


nothing gold can stay

by Naraht



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: 2018 Winter Olympics, Aging, Ballet, Boston, Coming of Age, F/M, Gen, Growing Up, Injury, London, M/M, Moscow, Post-Canon, Rivals, Russian Orthodoxy, Saint Petersburg, Wedding, growth spurt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2018-12-31 17:57:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 76,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12137976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: Yuri Plisetsky will never step out of Victor's shadow. Not if Victor has anything to do with it.Or, the epic Nikiforov-Plisetsky rivalry in the run-up to the 2018 Olympic Games.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic assumes that _Yuri on Ice_ was set in 2015.
> 
> The title is from the Robert Frost poem:
> 
> Nature’s first green is gold,  
> Her hardest hue to hold.  
> Her early leaf’s a flower;  
> But only so an hour. 
> 
> Then leaf subsides to leaf.  
> So Eden sank to grief,  
> So dawn goes down to day.  
> Nothing gold can stay.

Victor was like a vampire. If you hadn't staked him and watched him crumble into dust, then it was impossible to ensure that he was actually dead. Maybe not even then.

And what did that make Yuri? A cat with nine lives? A butterfly? 

Increasingly he suspected it was the latter. One glorious, delicate summer and then... nothing.

***

**March 2016**

As the days in Saint Petersburg began to lengthen, snowbanks melted into dirty piles of slush and flotsam. Massive blocks of ice crashed from the eaves of buildings, leaving smashed cars and, occasionally, smashed heads in their wake. ( _Death! destruction!_ thought Yuri giddily). 

And Yuri Plisetsky was growing.

He told himself that the aching joints, the odd attacks of terrible coordination, were because he was overtraining. It was impossible not to overtrain when he was sharing the ice with the unquenchable Victor Nikiforov and the indefatigable Yuuri Katsuki. Longer at the rink, longer in the gym, longer in the dance studio... all of it was a competition for Yuri, not that they even noticed. Damn them. 

The worst of it was that Yuri knew it wasn't overtraining. Or if it was, it was overtraining in an attempt to compensate for something even more insidious – the betrayal of his own body.

You didn't have to be a genius to figure it out. Even if he hadn't been a genius, he had plenty of people eager to draw his attention to the fact. He heard it from the nurse at his weekly weigh-ins, who measured his height too often for comfort and clucked approvingly at the result. He heard it from the physio as she frowned thoughtfully at his joints. He heard it from the masseuse even though the masseuse had no reason to care; he just liked to comment.

And he heard it from Yakov when he started missing triple axels. "Growing throws you off balance," he said. "It happens to everyone. You'll adjust eventually."

Yuri had no patience for _eventually_. After his victory at the Grand Prix Final he'd started pondering adding the triple axel - quad toe combination to his repertoire, wondering fancifully whether someday he might be the man to land the first quad axel. Now he was going backwards, wasting training time on a jump that he'd first landed when he was eleven.

"Just be glad you're not a woman," said Mila one morning when he hit the ice for the fifth time in a row. "Did you know that Liza had to have a breast reduction when she was sixteen?"

"Urgh, no, and I didn't want to know!" said Yuri, getting to his feet again with dignity and muscles equally bruised. "Disgusting."

Inwardly he was thinking, _but she had it easy, there was something obvious to cut off._ He would have done it without hesitation. But he had no such luck.

The worst was still to come. That afternoon he got a call from Victor Nikiforov.

"Yuuri's got a meeting with some JSF sponsors and apparently I'm not invited. Do you want to come over for dinner Saturday night?"

"Not really," said Yuri. "Was this Yakov's idea or something?"

Victor's tone was warm and charming. "You wound me! Don't you miss the time we spent together in Hasetsu? I do." 

"This was totally Yakov's idea," said Yuri.

"We could have at least pretended it was a social visit," said Victor, putting on a hurt tone that was just as fake as the charming one had been. "Plenty of skaters would be thrilled to have dinner with me. But yes, he thought that I could give you some advice on getting through growth spurts."

 _Great._ "Can you?"

"Yura, I'm 180 centimetres tall. I think I might know something about it."

"All right, fine."

"Fantastic! No need to bring anything; I'll just put together something simple. My address is Makarova Embankment..."

"I know where you live, asshole."

Yuri hung up the phone.

***

Really Yuri suspected that Yakov and Lilia just wanted to get him out of the apartment.

He came home from practice, like he did every night, aching and starving and hating himself, wanting nothing more than to stuff some food into his mouth, pull the covers over his head and never be seen or heard from again – only to be left standing at the door of the kitchen, hearing terrible, undeniable smoochy sounds emanating from within.

At least they were trying to hide it. They still didn't kiss when he was in the room. But they weren't doing a very good job of it. 

Yuri cleared his throat loudly, then found himself going into an inadvertent coughing fit, the aftereffects of a spring cold. "Hi," he said, wandering into the kitchen as casually as he could. "I live here."

"I know you live here," said Lilia, casting an indecipherable glance at Yakov, who had started cooking dinner. "I was reminded by the pile of unwashed dishes in the sink. And the pile of unwashed clothes by the laundry machine."

There was nothing you could say to that. It was impossible to talk back to Lilia; her years of training at the Moscow State Academy and the Bolshoi had left her an expert in the precise infliction of suffering. Yuri turned the hot water tap in the sink on full, squirted in way too much soap, and started washing the dishes.

"You don't need to make food for me tomorrow night," he announced once he'd worked up an adequate pile of bubbles. "I'm going out."

It made him sound just a little bit cool, he thought. It made him sound like he had a life.

"Good, so Victor finally remembered to invite you to dinner," said Yakov. "Why are you using so much soap?"

"You asked me to do the dishes!"

His hands stung from the hot water, finding every crack and fissure of winter-dry skin. It was almost enough to distract him from the pain in his feet, his knees, his back. Almost. These past few days it had felt like being stretched out over a rack. Not the good kind of stretching – on your coach's back before a competition, or after a really hot _banya_ – but the sort of slow, inexorable torture that you fantasised about inflicting on your enemies. Inch by inch until your bones popped and your muscles tore.

"Don't scowl like that," said Lilia. "It's unattractive."

Hands still submerged past the wrist, Yuri raised his chin, squared his shoulders, and imagined that he was standing at the _barre_. Pointing one bandaged toe, he snuck a sidelong glance at Yakov and Lilia to see whether they had noticed. 

Not only had they not noticed, but Lilia apparently thought _he_ wasn't looking, because she had her hand on Yakov's ass. Her whole hand. Like she was enjoying it or something.

Yuri looked hurriedly away, stared into the bubbles and tried to remember to breathe. Maybe it was a good idea that he was going to Victor's for dinner after all.

***

Victor answered the door wearing jeans and a button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow and buttons undone just enough to show his collarbone. He was holding a bowl of marinating chicken in one hand. It was like a double page spread from _OK!_ magazine: _Victor Nikiforov relaxing at home_. Maybe they would have chosen something more photogenic than the chicken.

Makkachin leapt up to add to the welcome, resting his paws on Yuri's chest and breathing his dog breath everywhere.

"Here you are!" said Victor, reaching up to run his hand through his hair, then thinking better of it once he realised the hand was still covered in chicken goo. "I'm just about to put this in the oven. It's nothing fancy, but..."

"Vitya, I live with Yakov and Lilia. Yakov gets all his menus out of nutrition plans and Lilia never eats anyway, she only sets foot in the kitchen to grope his ass." 

Victor blinked. "To... _what_?"

"Haven't you _noticed_? Or do you really just forget everything? You used to live with them. Didn't they do that then?"

"No," said Victor, sounding stunned. He dropped his hand, allowing Makkachin to lick his palm clean. "They didn't."

"You were lucky. They're all over each other like... It's gross."

 _Like you and Katsudon,_ he nearly said, but didn't.

"It's... wow," said Victor. "Really? Wow. I never thought."

Makkachin wove tight circles around them like he thought they were all about to go for a walk together. His tail wagged with surprising force, whacking Yuri in the kneecaps over and over again. Yuri winced.

"You're about four months behind, as usual," he said. "Weren't you going to, like, invite me in or something?"

"Of course! Come through, sit down at the table. I'll only be a minute."

Victor's apartment was stylish and sterile, interior decorated to within an inch of its existence, although Yuri had to admit it had picked up a few touches of humanity since Katsuki had moved in. Or at least an Xbox and a PS4, which was practically the same thing. The dining room table had folding legs and was jammed up against the island in the kitchen like an afterthought, as if the interior decorator had got that far with the plans before Victor remembered that he might want to eat occasionally. It said it all, really.

Yuri shrugged off his winter coat, threw it onto the couch, and sat down. 

On the table was a bottle of red wine and two glasses. Once Victor was done putting the chicken in the oven he unfussily deployed a corkscrew, and poured – without asking – full glasses of wine first for Yuri and then for himself.

"What's this?" said Yuri.

Victor paused with the bottle still in hand. "Don't you drink?"

"Well, I can't buy the stuff," said Yuri, because the occasional dents he'd made in Lilia's vodka collection – primarily over the past few months – were a secret he would take to the grave.

"Which is why I thought you might appreciate a civilized drink with dinner. Half a bottle before a rest day hardly counts, does it?"

Yuri, whose only encounter with any drink derived from grapes had been stolen sips of champagne at competition banquets, shrugged a sullen acquiescence.

"In which case, let's drink to health!" 

They had just touched glasses when Victor added, in a tone that suggested he thought he was being cute: "So our boy is becoming a man."

Yuri slammed his glass down, unsipped. "Don't think that you can get away with saying things like that to me just because you're giving me wine. I'm sixteen, not twelve or something. I'm already a man, I'm just short."

Victor smiled. "Not for long."

Yuri could have smacked him in his perfect face. But because he was now a man, not a boy, he refrained.

"All right, tell me then. What's the great secret?"

"To what?" asked Victor from beneath the rim of his glass.

"To getting though your growth spurt, idiot. What do you think I came here for? Free booze and the charm offensive?"

"Let me think," said Victor, casting his eyes towards the ceiling. "It was all such a long time ago, my memory is terrible..."

Yuri gave him a death glare, hoping that maybe it would concentrate his mind. Then he took a swallow of the wine. It was not bad, really. It was just weird, because of course he had tasted wine before at communion. It felt like he ought to be kissing the chalice and belatedly remembering all the things he hadn't confessed, not just sitting here drinking with Victor. Not that he believed in any of that, obviously. He frowned and took another swallow. 

"I know I was taller than you when I was sixteen," said Victor finally. "Because that was the year I won Junior Worlds, and the costume fits Yuuri now. Maybe I was a little smaller than him, let's say 170."

"A lot taller than me," said Yuri.

"Yes, but that part all seemed smooth. It was the last ten centimeters that caused the trouble. Or maybe I just choked going into seniors."

"Well, I didn't choke, I won."

"Mmm," agreed Victor, taking another sip of wine. "Won the Grand Prix anyway."

"I came in second at Euros, wasn't that enough? I don't care about Chris, I guess he deserved it."

All that time spent in Victor's shadow. Yuri wasn't lying, he didn't entirely begrudge Chris his gold. He could identify.

Coming in second in the European Championships still aged fifteen ought to have been enough. It would have been for enough anyone else. But it wasn't. Even in January, before he'd started suspecting that his aches and pains were down to anything more than the brutal demands of the sport, he'd felt poised on the edge, as if something he couldn't quite identify was about to slip out of his grasp. 

If only Victor had decided to compete. Yuri had watched him train with an eagle eye, had felt certain that he could beat him. Yes, he definitely could have beat him then – a Victor who had been back in training for precisely five weeks, still a bit soft around the edges and permanently distracted with fawning over Katsuki. Victor had wanted to go to Euros, and no doubt the Russian Skating Federation would have let him go to Euros, but Yakov had forbidden it.

When Yuri was eight, his grandfather had taken him to Novosibirsk to see a total eclipse of the sun, probably still hoping that he'd grow up to be a scientist or an engineer. Something respectable; his grandfather would have loved to become an engineer himself. Even then Yuri had known that it wasn't on the cards for him, but he'd been fascinated by the eclipse itself.

He'd stared upwards at the obscured sun, the fiery corona licking around the mountains of the moon, determined not to shift his gaze as the moon slipped aside and it roared back into blinding radiance. A bare moment later he had looked down at his feet, defeated, blinking away the bruised afterimages. His shadow had slowly deepened against the tarmac, mocking him.

That had been the year of Victor's first Olympic gold. And now he felt as if he was staring at the sun all over again. Victor's eclipse would not last for long. And it was up to Yuri not to blink this time.

Certainly Victor was not going to be providing any help.

"Fucking incredible," said Yuri, interrupting yet another spate of meaningless waffle. "You're not giving me advice at all, are you? You're trying to psych me out. You're afraid of me. You want me to crash and burn."

Victor smiled sweetly. "Why would I want that? Winning is so much more interesting when you have a worthwhile opponent."

Yuri blinked, trying to work out whether this was a compliment, whether Victor was implying that he'd be worthless if he didn't follow Victor's advice, or whether Victor was just saying that he was going to win no matter what. But there was no point wasting time with his riddles.

"So what did you do?" Yuri demanded. "What worked?"

"In the end, all I could do was wait for my technique to catch up with my body. Obviously it happened eventually."

" _Wait?_ That's your big mysterious answer?? How long?"

Victor pondered, rolled the wine around in his glass and took another drink. "I think it took me two years."

"You piece of shit," said Yuri. "You stinking asshole."

 _Two years,_ he thought furiously. _I can survive coming second for two years, if I have to. And by then Victor will be extinct. No way he'll make it to Pyeongchang. It'll be all mine._


	2. Chapter 2

**March 2016**

Victor was selected for Worlds. Of course Victor was selected for Worlds.

As the Russian Skating Federation stated in its dry, flat press release, there was no question of eligibility. Victor might not have stepped onto the ice as a competitor in nearly a year, but his TES minimum scores from the previous season – when he'd won everything there was to win – still held good. He was eligible for Worlds; no one could claim otherwise.

They could only complain that his selection was an outrage. And complain they did.

All over Twitter and Tumblr. Page after page on the Golden Skate and FSUniverse. Editorials across the world. Even the Russian press, which most of the time treated Victor as an angel sent down by God to the greater glory of the Russian nation, had its doubts. _WILL HE BE READY?_ ran the banner headline in _Sport Express_. _Izvestia_ wondered whether the 'cult of Victor Nikiforov' had gone too far. The editorial writer at _Komsomolskaya Pravda_ attacked Yakov and the RSF – 'are they pushing him into something that's better for them than it is for him?'

Yuri didn't read the papers. He found out an evening before the news broke publicly, when Yakov got a furious call from Tamara Trusova, his rival coach from Moscow.

"You know I don't make the decisions, Tamara Anatolyevna!" he said immediately into the phone. When they did speak, which was rare, they never stooped to anything as banal as opening greetings. "Why don't you take your complaints to someone who..."

He trailed off, obviously having been interrupted. _Can do something about it. Or gives a damn._

With one hand Yakov was making angry gestures to Yuri to get out of the sitting room. Yuri went, mustering what he liked to think was a tiny helping of Potya's injured dignity. It didn't matter. Although he had been able to hear Tamara's angry, tinny voice echoing on the line, he couldn't make out any of her words. And Yakov was loud enough that, moments after he shut the door of his own room, Yuri could hear the next bellow perfectly clearly.

"And you're intelligent enough to understand that his eligibility is not in question!"

Yuri threw himself backwards onto the bed and pointed his toes at the ceiling. His left big toe still hurt; it had been slamming into the end of his skates for a couple of weeks before he'd realised that his feet were growing too. His _feet_ were now bigger than Victor's. Freakish. 

"Surely you can't claim to be surprised!" This was a crock of shit because last spring Yakov himself had told the press that it would be impossible for Victor to make a comeback after a season out. "What, had you already booked your tickets to Boston? Am I meant to adjust my skaters' calendars to suit your personal convenience?"

After that Yuri tuned it out; it was just more of the same. He didn't even think that Yakov and Tamara really disliked each other. They just enjoyed the yelling (he could relate). On top of that, they had both been athletes: without a real competitor, they wouldn't have known what to do with themselves.

Yuri got up and went to dig in his closet for his secret stash of wild mushroom and sour cream potato chips. Yakov was making so much noise that he wouldn't be able to hear the sound of the bag opening.

It wasn't as if Yuri cared about any of this. He was definitely going to Worlds, whatever Victor did or didn't do. It had been pretty cool to hear that he'd been selected – he'd been at some pains to look blase – but it really hadn't been a surprise. His gold at the Grand Prix Final and silver at Europeans had made it as close to a certainty as possible. And Victor was... Victor. If Tamara wanted to complain about Yakov's lockup of the three men's slots at Worlds, she really ought to be bitching about Georgi. But she wasn't, because when it came down to it, no one gave a fuck about Georgi.

Personally, Yuri was glad that Victor was going to Worlds. After all, it would be his first chance to skate against Victor in a competition, his first chance to show him who was on top now. Who wanted to be Russia's hero by default? Without actually beating Victor, Yuri could win every medal on offer for the next ten years and the torch would never really be passed.

All he had to do now was actually win.

 _Win._ Yuri swallowed hard. A fragment of a potato chip had lodged itself at the back of his throat.

In the next room, Yakov was still shouting. "It's not unfairness or bad sportsmanship that my athletes happen to be better than yours!"

Two months earlier, at Europeans, Yuri had been confident that he could deliver. Before the growth of spring had put aches into all of his joints and left him permanently off balance. Before he'd started stepping out of his quad salchow and his triple axel. Before Victor had succeeded, against the odds, in re-tempering his aging body into a weapon. 

It was hell having to spend every day practicing at the rink with his two biggest rivals, fighting his insubordinate body every day while knowing that he was slipping further and further behind. Now that Victor was back to landing his quad flips 85% of the time, he had returned to his usual infuriating nonchalance, as if being engaged to Katsuki had really left him floating on air. Katsuki was even worse. He landed his own quad flip more often than not, he was devastatingly smooth on the ice – and he still talked about himself as if he were just scraping by. No more than a dime-a-dozen skater whom Yakov had taken on out of pity.

Yuri knew better; Yakov felt no pity. Not for Katsuki, not for anyone. Certainly not for him.

_If Katsuki thinks his own skating is that shitty, then what does he think about me?_

Yuri couldn't even contemplate it. He'd never got his own quad flip out of the harness; his quad salchow was bad enough now that it was hubris to say that he had it at all. He was decaying every day, over the hill at sixteen. He was certain – worst indignity of all – that both Victor and Katsuki felt sorry for him.

"You just wait until they sweep the podium!" Yakov was thundering in the next room. "All three of them! No one will be asking questions then!"

 _Now I know how Georgi feels,_ thought Yuri. _Fuck. No wonder he's so messed up._

***

All of them flew business class to the Worlds in Boston. Yakov, Lilia, Victor, Georgi, Mila and Yuri. And Yuuri Katsuki. One big dysfunctional family.

Given that the ISU only paid economy fares for competitors, Yuri suspected Victor of having bankrolled a whole round of upgrades to avoid the awkwardness of him and Katsuki flying business class by themselves. It was Victor through and through, the sort of self-regarding generosity that was really more like selfishness.

But maybe it didn't matter, because in a sense Victor bankrolled everything anyway. He was the reason St Petersburg had paid twice for improvement work on the rink in the past decade; he was the reason Yakov had been able to invite Yuri to his summer camp year after year without asking for money; he was why sponsors paid through the nose for Rostelecom and to get their logos on the team jersey. He was Russian skating. Everything they did was built on his victories.

Yuri wouldn't have turned down the ticket even if he'd had the choice. He hadn't turned down the rest of it, had he? Maybe the best revenge was taking all of Victor's condescending charity – and then beating him into the ground with it. If he could win.

He spent the first leg of the flight slouched in his seat with his hood pulled over his head, playing video games and doing his best to ignore everyone else. Victor and Katsuki sitting in the row in front of him, talking in low voices, nothing audible but the caressing tones. Anyone watching would think that he didn't give a fuck, that he was too cool to care about their stupid conversation, that he was bored and disdainful and just waiting to get off the plane and crush them at Worlds. 

It was a lie. All of it. He wiped his sweaty palms on his hoodie and hoped no one had seen.

During the layover at Charles de Gaulle, he couldn't stand to sit still with everyone else in the lounge. There was a dull sky outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, an expanse of empty tarmac, and despite the climate-controlled air he felt claustrophobic, suffocated. 

So he got up and went wandering around the terminal staring at electronic gizmos he didn't really need. Headphone splitters, power packs, those stupid braided charging cables. It was amazing how much crap they could shovel into one airport shop. Electric muscle massagers. He wondered if they actually worked. He had foam rollers, obviously, and those spiky massage balls, which looked pretty metal. But sometimes...

Crap, there was Katsuki coming in to browse. Of all the stores in Charles de Gaulle, why did he have to pick this one? Yuri looked away from the massagers, pretended that he was studying the neck pillows instead. There was no way in hell he wanted Katsuki to know that sometimes, when he was lying in bed, just pointing his toes the wrong way would make his calf muscles cramp up so badly that it was minutes before he could uncurl his toes again. Probably it would be less embarassing to pretend he wanted the massager for jerking off.

Katsuki moved to study a rack of power adapters, standing shoulder to shoulder with Yuri but never meeting his gaze. 

"Competing against Victor for the first time is tough," he observed, as if he were making a banal comment about the weird American plugs. Or the weather.

"What do you know?" said Yuri. 

It came out a little more harshly than he'd intended. Some people said things like _oh really?_ at this point in a conversation but he'd never really developed the knack.

"I've done it?" replied Katsuki, his voice raising in a half question at the end.

Yuri could have hit him for being so tentative. Katsuki had skated against Victor in the Grand Prix Final after all, and he probably could have beaten him if he hadn't been such a walking human disaster area at the time. He was probably going to beat Victor at Worlds. And Yuri too.

"You're shit at being supportive," said Yuri. "You shouldn't try. And I don't need it anyway. Potya is fine; _I'm_ not going to end up crying in a public toilet. Why don't you go try to make _him_ feel better about competing against _me_ for the first time?"

His face was burning. Sympathy from Katsuki, of all people. It was too hideous. 

"Probably I should," said Katsuki, so neutrally that it was impossible to read his tone. "Or at least I'd better go and find him before he buys out the Chanel cosmetics counter again."

He retreated again before Yuri could even think of a better insult.

"You're the one who ought to be worried!" Yuri shouted at Katsuki's retreating back. "Haven't you realised yet what a selfish bastard he is? Once he gets on the ice again he won't even remember your name!"

Both the girl from the electronics shop and some random middle-aged businessman who was looking at iPad cases both turned to look at him; Katsuki didn't even pause in his stride. 

Yuri looked around him, wanting nothing more than to pull up his hood and disappear from view, but he'd left his hoodie in the lounge. Hurriedly leaving the store, he saw Victor and Katsuki across the way looking at makeup. There was nowhere he could go except a stall in the bathrooms. He sat there until the final boarding call for the flight to Boston, scrolling through Instagram until all the pictures blurred together into a pixellated irrelevance.

But he wasn't crying, so it was okay.

***

Stepping out of the international terminal in Boston, Yuri blinked in the dazzle of a high, bright sun and the shock of cold. It must have been minus 20 C. The wind was whipping newfallen snow into little drifts playing across the asphalt. Taxis navigated their way through half-lanes blocked by snowbanks too high to be pushed to the side of the road. In the distance, a cluster of skyscapers marked out the business district.

"Fuck, it's arctic!" he said, quickly pulling up his hoodie and unzipping his suitcase to rummage for his gilet. He had to shove his illicit chocolate out of the way before Lilia saw. "It's worse than Piter! Why didn't anyone tell me it was going to be like this?"

"America is a big place," said Victor, serene in his wool coat and a big fur collar. His silver hair ruffled in the wind. He was holding Katsuki's hand casually, pretending not to notice the little crowd of photographers snapping. "It's not... what were you expecting, anyway? Orlando?"

"It's not any colder than Detroit," said Katsuki.

"You just have to moisturise," said Victor, who had spent most of the time at baggage claim complaining about the lack of an arrivals lounge where he could fix his hair and do something about his tragically ancient face before meeting his public.

Yuri made a gagging noise and climbed into the waiting car.

***

The press crowded every practice session, eager for any hint of Victor's form. When he stepped onto the ice everything else seemed to stop. Coaches forgot about their own skaters; the skaters themselves were constantly looking over their shoulders at the competition. Yuri felt slightly reassured that it was actually kind of difficult to concentrate on landing your own jumps with Victor Nikiforov out on the ice being all _Victor_ all over everything.

Ironically, the only people who didn't seem to give a damn about Victor's imminent return to competition were Yakov and Lilia. Yuri wasn't even certain they'd really noticed that Victor was on the ice. They were standing side by side at the boards, shoulders almost touching, pretending to watch the practice session. Every so often Yakov would yell something at Victor, but this meant nothing because Yakov could and did yell about ice skating in his sleep. He had left his hand resting casually on Lilia's like he thought people would believe it had just landed there by accident. 

Lilia was yawning, covering her mouth with the tips of her perfectly manicured fingers. Lilia never yawned; Lilia never got jet lag. When they had checked in, Yuri had been close enough to notice that she and Yakov had reserved a single hotel room. And there was no fucking way that it was to save money. 

Yes, his coach and choreographer were using the ISU World Figure Skating Championships as an excuse to have an expenses-paid dirty weekend without needing to worry about being overheard by their top athlete. Yuri would have been disgusted if he weren't so amused.

Trying to stay warm and loose before his own group took the ice, he smirked from inside his hoodie. It served Victor right that he couldn't even grab the attention of his own coach. 

On top of that, his music was shit. Yuri rolled his eyes as the opening synthesiser shimmer of Madonna's "Lucky Star" filled the rink and Victor glided into his first sequence. He might as well have announced _hello, I'm old and irrelevant, plus I have no taste whatsoever_. Not to mention that kiss of death, _I only chose this song because it makes me think of my boyfriend._

Lilia had been incandescent about it, even though she hadn't choreographed for Victor since he was eighteen and must have understood that she never would again. Even though she was choreographing for Yuri instead. _You see,_ Yuri wanted to say to her, _this is what you get from Victor. Exactly what he wants, no more and no less._

But Victor did have balls, you had to give him that.

In the sort of triumphant 'fuck you' on an epic scale that only Victor could pull off in an untelevised practice session, he was both skating his heart out – with more _joie de vivre_ than he'd shown on the ice in years – and skipping every single jump in his routine. You could practically hear the men of the press holding their breath every single time Victor gathered and tensed himself for a jump, every muscle trembling within millimetres of release – then, after a blank moment of pause when he should have been flying, he stretched his free leg in a perfect, superfluous arabesque. After the first two skipped jumps, Yuri knew that he was going to mark the whole routine, as if it were merely a formality to get out of the way before he could go back to coaching Katsuki through his. But the journalists and commentators kept hoping. After the final planned jump – a declared quad loop that Yuri knew perfectly well Victor had been practicing as a combination – he aimed a wink in their direction. You could practically hear the exhalations of disgust from halfway across the rink.

When Victor came off the ice, sweat rolling down his face, Yuri was there waiting for him. If Yakov wasn't going to bother with the telling off, then he would do it instead. _Yuri Plisetsky, part-time assistant coach, full-time asshole._

"What the fuck was that?" he said. "Don't you know you have to compete tomorrow? You just really hate the press? And the judges? Or are you afraid?"

Victor smiled his most brilliant, glossy smile. "I'm saving it for someone I love."

And then he made his way to the showers without another word.

While the ice was being resurfaced for the next group, Yakov went out and and came back with coffees from Dunkin Donuts for him and Lilia. No, not coffee for Lilia, hot chocolate. Yuri did a double take; it was definitely hot chocolate. This was like red alert stuff. Lilia never drank anything other than black coffee, she said the calories were ridiculous. But she just smiled and took it out of Yakov's hands and took a sip. It left a tiny mustache of froth on her upper lip.

Having observed this with disbelief, Yuri stepped onto the ice, then skated back to Yakov to give him his blades. Suddenly he wasn't amused by Yakov's distraction anymore.

"Are you going to watch me, Yakov? You'd better be watching me."

As he started his warm-up, it struck him that this was exactly the sort of thing that Katsuki said to Victor. He ought to be ashamed of himself. More to the point he wished that he hadn't asked Yakov to watch him after all. He wished that no one was watching him. He wished that, like Victor, he could afford to do exactly what he wanted and damn everyone else to hell.

Oh well. He might as well get it over with. He went into the approach for his quad toe loop, and launched hard off his toe pick – only to massively bobble the landing. He didn't fall but he felt like he was stumbling across the ice for seconds before he got his balance back.

He had no trouble imagining what the commentators would be saying on TV that night. _He's been having trouble with the quad toe loop in practice,_ they would remark in those condescending, sickeningly fake tones of sympathy – as if they cared, as if they'd ever landed a quad toe loop back in the '90s when they'd called themselves competitive skaters, more than a lifetime ago.

He threw his head back into a spin, dizzied by the imagined voices echoing in his head. No one was filming this practice session apart from a few people with their phones, but it was as if he could already feel the television lights burning hot into his skin. Slowing out of the spin a few beats early, he looked down and was shocked to see his pale, bare arms still speckled with gooseflesh.

"Concentrate, Yura!" came Yakov's voice from the sidelines. "Just concentrate!"

 _Why don't *you* fucking concentrate?_ he wanted to shout back.

He flung himself into the second quad out of anger, and on this one he actually fell. He lay for a moment on the ice, seeing JJ's blades go flashing past his eyes, so angry that he expected the ice go spitting up into steam.

"Fine, fine," he said, hauling himself to his feet before Yakov could have a conniption, his hip still throbbing from the impact.

He wasn't fine. He was furious. But it wasn't as if he could do anything about that now – or about his quads.

***

Boston was the lamest city on earth. 

Yuri came to this conclusion about ten minutes after leaving the rink. Despite his bruises and battered feet, he was getting tired of being delivered everywhere like a signed-for parcel, thank you very much, so he had insisted on making his own way back to the hotel. Because Yakov and Lilia were still in the grips of temporary insanity, presumably eager to move on to an evening of fucking and ordering room service, they had agreed.

All he found outside was a wasteland of dirty snowbanks and the plate glass facades of offices long closed for the evening. It was after dark, only the barest remnants of royal blue left in the sky. There was ice everywhere. His ankles protested as he climbed over solidly frozen ruts in what had obviously been slush hours earlier, thinking how ironic it would be if his career-ending injury came out on the streets of this crappy city. He wondered whether Yakov would agree to lie on his behalf, to say that he'd been practicing late on a rink somewhere else. 

The snow wasn't any worse than Piter, really, but it still pissed him off, and it wasn't like there was anything worthwhile to see either. After following the road actually under a massive parking garage, he found himself out on a wide, empty plaza with the wind buffeting into him. He had to wander around for ages before he could get through to the street on the other side.

There were a few bars here and there, but he was still two years short of being able to buy a drink in Russia and he wasn't stupid enough to think that the Americans, with their fanatical puritanism, would even let him through the door. Headlights swept past unheeding. He tried to hail a private car but not a single one of the assholes stopped for him. Typical.

Finally he found himself in Chinatown, which was at least something that they didn't have in Saint Petersburg. His stomach growled expectantly; he thought the least he could do was get dinner. 

Next to a plate glass window that was opaque with condensation, droplets of water rolling slowly down, he sat at a little table with a pot of jasmine tea and a big bamboo steamer of pork dumplings in front of him, and texted Otabek. _Aren't you done with practice yet? Come and help me eat dumplings. I'm in Chinatown._

_I can't. Coach wouldn't let me rent a motorcycle. Said the roads were too icy._

Yuri pondered this for a moment, taking an absent-minded bite out of a dumpling. The filling burned his tongue.

 _I walked,_ he typed finally.

After a long pause: _You're crazy, but in a good way. See you tomorrow?_

 _Tomorrow_ , typed Yuri, with the greatest of affection, _they're going to have to scrape you off the ice._

***

It was the last time that Yuri would ever have to skate _Agape_. He didn't believe it. It felt as if he'd spent at least half his life chained to this program. It was a year and a half since, unsuspecting, he'd first seen Victor sketching out the ideas on the ice at the Yubileyny Sports Palace; nearly a year since Victor had thrown it into his lap in Hasetsu, wittering about _God's unconditional love_ and feelings too deep to express in words.

Yuri wasn't stupid. He might only be sixteen but he was certain he understood the concept at least as well as Victor did. It was just that he knew that unconditional love was in painfully short supply on earth. If anyone had shown it to him, it was his grandfather, and plenty of people would say that he had tested it to its limits. But then so had Yuri's junkie mother, showing up again and again begging for forgiveness, for one last chance – but really mostly for money for another fix. If his grandfather could turn his own daughter away, how could anyone say that unconditional love was real?

All love came with strings attached. Yakov loved him, in his gruff way. Lilia didn't hate him either; he had seen the tears in her eyes after his victory at the Grand Prix Final, much though she had tried to hide them. But this was a self-regarding love; they loved their own pride in him, seeing themselves reflected in him. They loved him because he won. How many young, hopeful skaters had gone to Yakov over the years, equally willing to deliver body and soul for victory, and come up short? How many of their names did he remember now?

The press loved Yuri; his fans loved Yuri; the world loved Yuri, the fifteen-year-old prodigy who'd taken the Grand Prix Final by storm. Yet if he failed them, they would turn away just as quickly. How was he meant to think about unconditional love on the ice when he knew that their faith in him only lasted as far as the next jump?

In the locker room before the short program, Yuri studied his costume. It had been well worn even before he'd inherited it, having carried Victor through a year of juniors competitions. (In Victor's case, the year he was fourteen.) Now, up close and under the pitiless gaze of HDTV cameras, it was looking distinctly battered. There was the ghost of a purple stain if you knew where to look, the remnants of a juice box that had exploded after he'd stabbed it too hard with a straw. There was the faint rusty trail of a burst blood blister that had rubbed against the fabric when he took it hurriedly off. There were two invisible darns in the mesh where it had been torn in falls. It had been let out once at the seams, then given a hard-won few centimetres at the ankles with the extra fabric that Victor's costume-maker had laid aside all those years before. It was not enough; it pulled painfully at his shoulders and crotch when it was zipped up now, each stitch straining visibly against the fabric.

"Don't scowl," said Lilia, smoothing down the 'wings' at his shoulders. "Half an hour and then you'll be done with it. Perfection requires pain."

"I don't see how you can expect a perfect Biellman when my _costume_ won't even stretch that far."

"I don't accept excuses."

"No excuses," repeated Yuri mechanically. It was one of her favorite mantras.

Lilia picked an imaginary piece of fluff off his costume, tucked a stray strand of hair behind his ear. For a moment her hand lingered, knuckles brushing against his cheek. Then she held up his team jacket for him; he put out his arms and she slid it up onto his shoulders.

"Be beautiful," she said. "That's the most important thing. Be a work of art, Yura."

***

When Yuri stepped onto the ice, the roar of the crowd was like a wall, an avalanche that could sweep you away. It was like nothing he'd heard before – not at Rostelecom, not at the Grand Prix Final. It was the way that people screamed for Victor, a champion at the height of his powers.

But he wasn't Victor. He never would be.

Skating to his starting position at the centre of the rink, Yuri tried to force himself to breathe. Yakov had been shouting at him for months now about not starting too quickly before he had prepared himself. Like Yakov insisted, he counted to ten – his pounding heart rushing the tempo along – before taking up his opening pose. As he listened to the cheers dying away into expectant silence, he tried to conjure up around him the immensity of unconditional love.

He felt nothing but his own numb terror.

Anything was better than this unbearable waiting. When the music began, Yuri threw himself into sudden motion. Triple axel came first. A bad landing; for a heartbeat he thought he'd saved it, but his foot was never really under him, and the momentum took him over. Overrotated. Not a hard fall, which made it even more galling.

The Biellman spin swept upon him while his muscles were still tensed from the fall. Despite his growth, the intensive ballet training meant he _could_ still do a Biellman – hauling his free leg hard upwards, turning his elbow upwards, his back and his hamstrings crying in protest – but once upon a time it had looked effortless, and he knew it didn't look effortless now. He released his skate a little sooner than he wanted to, his free leg dropping inelegantly to the ice once again.

The quad sal he did land, but it felt wrong, something a millisecond off. Before he could think what it was, instinct kicked in and he found himself doubling the triple toe that followed. Perhaps it was self-preservation; perhaps he was just a coward.

The quad toe loop was his final jump. By now he was gasping, both longing for and dreading the end, when he would be confronted with the monster he had created. He didn't care about elegance any more; he couldn't remember love. He threw himself into the jump, smacked down hard but just managed to get his leg around.

And that was that. That was the end of _Agape_.

 _God's judgment,_ thought Yuri, sitting in the Kiss and Cry afterwards waiting for his scores. _That's what Victor really should have made this routine about. The final judgment. Being cast into the abyss._

But what did Victor know about that? The only judgment he ever faced was on the ice, and there he was always found worthy. In the rest of his life, people made every allowance for him, because he was a living legend; he got away with anything. He was untouchable. 

On the ice, he seemed damn near untouchable as well. After the short program he was in first, just ahead of Katsuki, having landed every jump that he'd marked during practice, and thrown in his massive, undeclared quad loop - triple salchow combination.

No one could doubt that he was back, and that he was out for blood.

***

Victor Nikiforov was within touching distance of his sixth consecutive world championship when he fell on his final jump in the free program. 

So Victor Nikiforov was mortal after all. By three points, Yuuri Katsuki became the new ISU world champion. 

And Yuri Plisetsky? He took sixth. Hardly worth mentioning. $7000 in prize money.

It was good enough that people knew his Grand Prix Final win hadn't been a fluke; not quite bad enough for people to stop saying that he was the next Victor Nikiforov. The thought of that was almost enough to make him want to bomb a competition out of spite, something that even Victor in the depths of his depression hadn't had the guts to do, though he had threatened it.

While they were rolling out the red carpet for the podium ceremony, Yuri loitered uselessly in the competitors' area rinkside. He wanted to just leave, but he knew perfectly well that it would look like sour grapes. He hadn't come in sixth in anything since Junior Worlds when he was fourteen. He didn't really know what to do.

"I'm disappointed in you!" Yakov had said to Yuri once he got free of the media circus around Victor. "You could have done so much better than that! You should have focused on your own skating and not on Victor's!"

By Yakov's standards, it was quite a mild telling-off. He knew that Yakov felt sorry for him.

"Ugh," said Yuri. "I wish I could just rewind time."

"No one can do that. But you can at least learn from your mistakes!"

Was it Yuri's imagination or had Yakov cast a glance towards Lilia? Just what he needed; re-heated relationship advice. Thankfully some journalist came and dragged Yakov away again.

After that it was JJ. 

"Better luck next time, buttercup," he said, throwing an arm casually around Yuri's shoulder.

"Better luck yourself!" shot back Yuri, shrugging out of his touch. JJ had ended up in fifth, which was satisfying but still too good for comfort.

JJ smiled in his unironic Canadian way, as if he thought Yuri had just given him sincere good wishes. "Thanks! See you at the Grand Prix next year."

Everyone seemed to want to talk to Yuri. Everyone except the one person he really wanted to talk to: Victor. He tracked him down, finally, while the techs were trying to fix some sort of glitch with the lighting. Katsuki, standing by Victor's side, was being hugged vigorously by both Chulanont and Cialdini simultaneously. Victor was staring into the middle distance, looking stunned.

"I bet you threw it," said Yuri without preamble. "You fell on purpose."

Victor looked utterly stricken. This was not because it was true – Yuri had seen Victor miss jumps thousands of times on thousands of days, he knew exactly what it looked like – but because the question was forcing him, just as Yuri had intended, into admitting his own weakness.

He shook his head. "I was exhausted," he said, the line of a frown biting deep between his eyebrows. "I just couldn't get the rotation. I don't have Yuuri's stamina."

No one could deny that he had skated his heart out. He had thrown so much exuberance into 'Feeling Good' that he'd made it look like an exhibition skate – up until the moment that his body had betrayed him.

"That sucks," said Yuri insincerely. "But I bet you're still glad he won. You going to give me advice now about how to lose gracefully?"

A cloud passed across Victor's face. For the barest millisecond Yuri wondered whether Victor might actually say 'who?' or 'fuck no.' But then his expression flickered again, the lover burying the competitor far beneath the surface.

Victor beamed. "There couldn't be anything better than losing to Yuuri!"

By the time the podium ceremony was over, everything had returned to normal. Katsuki had burst into tears as soon as the gold medal was put around his neck; Victor, brandishing his own silver as if it were platinum, had announced to everyone who would listen that now they were getting married; and the two of them had made out with sufficient intensity while still standing on the podium to satisfy anyone who'd complained about the limited camera angles at the Cup of China, and really piss off the U.S. Skating Federation. Meanwhile Otabek stood quizzically beside them, holding his bronze medal.

"Congratulations," said Yuri once Otabek stepped off the podium, his hands still stuck in his pockets. There was so much hugging going around that he wondered whether he should hug Otabek, but it would probably be sort of weird even as a friendly thing. "I mean, I guess it sort of sucks getting bronze again, but..."

"Thanks," said Otabek simply. He sounded proud, not upset.

He didn't hug Yuri either; Yuri guessed that was fine. Instead they just looked at each other. For the first time ever, Yuri realised that he was looking down at Otabek.

"You're not growing at all, are you? You get to stay just as tall as you are for the rest of your life."

Otabek shrugged. "I guess so. I'm eighteen, after all."

"It's not fair. No wonder you can still land all your jumps."

"Yeah, but you're going to be tall, like Victor."

He was going to be tall. It wasn't the first time he'd heard it; the doctor at the rink had said the same thing a few months ago. _He's a late bloomer; he's not done yet._ But he still didn't believe it.

"Not as tall as Victor," said Yuri. "That would be... urgh."

"We'll see, I guess. Next year."

"Next year," echoed Yuri. 

It seemed like an eternity. A year ago he'd been on the top step of the podium, the Juniors world champion; in another year it would be the Olympic qualifiers. Who knew who would be looking down at whom by then?

Otabek turned his head. For a second Yuri just found himself staring at the line of his undercut, then he followed his gaze to the side of the rink, where Yakov and Tamara Trusova were shouting at each other again.

"Do they hate each other as much as it looks like?" asked Otabek.

"Yakov hates her as much as I hate Victor," said Yuri.

Otabek nodded, a little half nod. "Ah."

Yuri wondered if Otabek actually understood what that meant – because he certainly didn't.

***

Yuri forgave Otabek for being short. The next day, before the gala and the banquet, they spent all day sitting together on the bed in Otabek's hotel room, playing _Fifa World Cup_. In the cafe in Barcelona, until they'd been so rudely interrupted, they'd talked about all sorts of things – Yakov's summer camp, and Otabek's coaches, and ballet. Now they didn't need to talk about much, and that was equally good. They ordered room service for lunch; Otabek seemed to think his coach wouldn't mind.

Without thinking, Yuri texted Victor. _Tell Yakov I'm not coming for lunch. I'm with Otabek._

"Doesn't it seem weird," said Yuri, munching on a club sandwich, "that we're, like, the best skaters in the world and we're sitting here pretending we're footballers?"

Otabek considered for a moment. "We'd get paid better if we were."

"Yeah," said Yuri. He paused. "I guess I'm not the best in the world anyway. I'm sixth."

"You've got to come in sixth some of the time," said Otabek philosophically.

No one ever said this to Yuri; no one even admitted that it was a possibility. He felt that familiar panic rising in his throat at the thought. It wasn't OK, it couldn't be OK.

"No I don't! Victor never does!"

"Didn't he, though? I mean, a long time ago?"

 _Two years,_ Yuri remembered Victor saying. It had been an exaggeration but it hadn't been a lie: you could see the gap in his 'competitive highlights' chart on Wikipedia. You could watch the old programs: a laughably gangly teenage Victor – an incriminating spot even visible on his chin underneath the concealer – mistiming jump after jump, refusing to accept a hug from Yakov when he stepped off the ice sniffing back his tears. But still...

"It's like he's not the same person now," said Yuri. "He hardly remembers it. He wasn't THE Victor Nikiforov then, you know?"

"But that's how he got there, isn't it? There's a saying, _lose the battle but win the war._ That's how I think about it. You're going to fall and there's going to be bullshit scoring. That's life. But they can't stop you from shining. That's what you have to think about, not the rest of it."

If anything, Yuri thought that the bullshit scoring had gone in his direction. But he didn't say this. Otabek was, he thought, a much better person than him. Otabek was the sort of person he ought to be, the sort of person he wanted to be. Or maybe he was just the sort of person he wanted to fuck; like with Katsuki, it was difficult to tell the difference sometimes.

Having finished his spaghetti bolognaise, Otabek had lain back on the bed. He gazed meditatively at the ceiling, his hands folded behind his head. Yuri lay down next to him, a little self conscious. A spring creaked under his hand. He cast a quick glance in Otabek's direction, then looked back up at the ceiling as if he too could see something interesting up there.

He wondered whether he ought to kiss Otabek. It would be really easy; they were only a few inches apart. Maybe Otabek was expecting that he would. On the other hand, wouldn't he have said something? He was the one who had asked Yuri if they were going to become friends. He had come right out and said it; they had shaken hands and everything. He obviously liked Yuri, but that was different than wanting to kiss him or (oh God) have sex with him. Probably he'd never even thought about it, and if Yuri said something it would mess everything up. He could just imagine Otabek saying, _you asshole, I asked you to become my friend, not to try to fuck me. Are you an idiot or something? Did I give you any sign that I actually wanted you?_

So Yuri sighed and just lay there. In the background, the endlessly looped roar of the crowd from the game was like waves at the seashore. Real crowds, in person, sounded nothing like that.

"I don't want to be the next Victor Nikiforov," Yuri said finally. "I'd rather die."

Why had he said that? Couldn't he have said something about the game instead, or suggested that they order dessert from room service? Why the fuck couldn't he just be normal sometimes?

"Don't die," said Otabek. "You have everything to live for. You're just at the beginning of your journey."

It was funny; usually he was so quiet and stoic, and then every so often he came out with these sayings, like he had a constant inspirational monologue or Tumblr feed (practically the same thing) inside his head.

"I didn't _mean_ it," said Yuri, a little annoyed.

"Also," Otabek added, "I'd miss you."

"Yeah," said Yuri, because there was nothing else to say.

So they lay side by side in companionable, terrifying silence, while Yuri prayed to God that Otabek wouldn't notice his hard-on. He rolled onto his front, trying to hide it, then shifted around awkwardly feeling like it was perfectly obvious anyway. 

Finally, exhausted after the competion, Yuri fell asleep. 

A couple of hours later he was woken by the ringing of his phone. He answered it sleepily, Otabek stirring beside him, only to hear Yakov screaming at him about how he wasn't in his room and how he was going to miss the gala.

"I really needed that nap," said Otabek, sitting up. He ran a hand through his hair, which was sticking in all directions, and smiled at Yuri as if nothing could be more normal. "Let's go."

***

What really pissed Yuri off – if anything could be singled out from his general mood of pissed-offness – was that he hadn't been asked to do an exhibition skate.

After the Grand Prix Final, everyone in the ISU must have known exactly how awesome his exhibition skate was. Scratch that, everyone in the _world_ who mattered knew that. The official ISU video of 'Welcome to the Madness' had more views (Yuri checked this periodically) than anything else from the season apart from Victor and Katsuki's 'Stammi Vicino' duet. And that involved the two of them, each with their own group of fans, so really statistically it didn't count.

Despite that he'd been passed over. He didn't know why but he suspected it had something to do with America's ridiculous puritanism. After the Grand Prix Final, SKATING had run a big article headlined 'Are we over-sexualizing teenagers?' with a picture of him doing his big hydroblade, shirt riding all the way up. Not that there were any mixed messages there, right? He had considered boycotting the gala on principle, but then he would have missed Otabek doing his big Eminem remix skate – his own remix – in that baggy, semi-transparent hoodie. He never got tired of that.

He sat next to Mila in the competitors' seats. 

"Isn't Otabek great?" she said, her eyes shining green in the light of the strobes. "It's so inventive. If Victor really wanted to surprise the audience he should have done something like that."

Yuri folded his arms. "He's kind of stiff." That was what happened when you stopped doing ballet. "And he could take some lessons from Lambiel in how to make baggy stuff like that look graceful."

"Really?" Her disbelief was hardly audible over the screams of the audience. " _That's_ all you have to say about it?"

Yuri shrugged. "It's true, isn't it?"

He felt differently when Otabek came off the ice, looking quietly satisfied with himself and wiping the sweat off his forehead with the fabric of his bunched up hoodie. He sat down next to Yuri, in the seat Yuri had saved for him.

"Awesome," said Yuri in an undertone, so that Mila couldn't hear.

Otabek bumped shoulders with him in acknowledgment. "They should have asked you too."

Instead of 'Welcome to the Madness,' the assembled audience at the ISU World Figure Skating Championships had the joy of watching Victor Nikiforov skating to 'You Sexy Thing,' a routine that Yuri had been treated to with painful frequency ever since Victor had come back to Saint Petersburg in December.

 _The choreography is really challenging,_ Victor had earnestly confessed. _If they don't understand that Yuuri's the sexy thing, not me, then it'll mean that I've got it all wrong. I've got to make sure that the narrative is clear. This is my tribute to Yuuri._

From the screams from the crowd when Victor first dropped the _jinbei_ off his shoulder, looking over his shoulder and wiggling it to the beat, Yuri guessed that they thought he was the sexy thing, though possibly the subsequent pelvic thrusts in Katsuki's direction helped to clear things up. It was all too horrible. He hid his face behind his hands and prayed for it to be over soon.

***

Unlike the hotel in Sochi, the Boston Marriott Copley Place apparently didn't fit stripper poles as standard in their banquet rooms. On top of this the ISU had sent round a bulletin to all the coaches and choreographers saying that there was going to be absolutely no stripping, pole dancing, dance battling, or "any other activity likely to bring the sport of figure skating into disrepute." There wasn't even any champagne; Yuri tried to take a perfectly respectable glass of white wine only to have it plucked out of his hand again by some gorgon from U.S. Figure Skating.

Unfortunately, Victor was looking on with amusement. "Bad luck." 

"Fuck off," said Yuri.

This was not the sort of thing that dissuaded Victor at all. From Yuri, he treated an insult like that as light repartee. He might not have been a fluent speaker of _mat_ himself, but he never blinked.

"So, you and Otabek, hmm? That's why you were late?" 

"We were playing Fifa World Cup, keep your sick jerkoff fantasies to yourself! We're friends. Maybe you'd understand if you'd ever had one."

After he'd said this, Yuri looked around hurriedly to see whether Otabek had overheard, but he wasn't anywhere within sight. Thank God.

"I think it's sweet," said Victor. "And I think he really likes you. Don't miss out because both of you are too shy to take the next step."

"I'm not missing out on anything, thank you," said Yuri. "Unlike some people, I'm not obsessed with getting fucked."

Victor looked unconvinced. He took a thoughtful sip from his own glass of wine.

Yuri sighed. "Look, if you're not going to go away, at least talk to me about something interesting. Tell me why you decided to mark your whole routine in practice."

Victor shrugged. "My back was bothering me a bit. It seemed safer not to risk anything."

"Your _back_? You never said!"

"Not to you," said Victor. For the first time that evening, he smiled his sweetest, most condescending smile. Someone ought to start a dictionary of Victor's smiles. "Obviously I told Yakov. You were competing against me, weren't you? Why would I have said?"

Over the past seven years that he'd been training on the same rink at Victor, Yuri had seen and heard it all, whether he'd wanted to or not. Granted, Victor didn't go on about his breakups like Georgi did, but you couldn't spend six days a week with someone – God, they even showered together – without knowing just about everything about them. Or so he had thought.

"I don't know," said Yuri, feeling stupid. "You usually do. Usually I can't get you to shut up."

Victor raised his eyebrows. "You're in Seniors. And you're very good. It's different now."

 _He thinks I'm very good,_ thought Yuri, a moment of warmth spreading through him, as if he'd downed the wine after all. Then he reminded himself that he was meant to be angry at Victor.

"All right, don't tell me, I don't care. Tell Katsudon, if he's not too much competition for you. It'll be good not to hear about every little thing."

"Don't worry," said Victor. "It was just a twinge, I was probably just sitting wrong on the plane. Yakov was being a mother hen as usual. I saw a physio and it's fine now. So there's nothing to stop me competing next year too!"

And _that_ smile was the bared teeth of a born competitor, letting Yuri know that he wasn't going to go easily.

Maybe what Victor really needed, thought Yuri, was a little help to move on to his retirement. Tonya Harding style, with an iron pipe to the kneecap... 

He shivered in sympathetic horror. _No? OK._ Even he wasn't quite that bad. Good to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Otabek's routine is, of course, based on Denis Ten's [exhibition at the 2016 Trophee de France](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkka_LX1i9I)
> 
> Yuri and Otabek's post-competition gaming is based on [an episode](https://youtu.be/OkUCzOW4iXA?t=2m46s) of Orica Scott's Backstage Pass, in which Jens Keukelaire revealed that he spent nine hours during one rest day at the Tour de France playing Fifa World Cup. And then he took a nap. Elite athletes - they're just like us. (Note the rest of the video might be NSFW, depending on your feelings about sports massage and ice baths. Enjoy!)


	3. Chapter 3

**June 2016**

In her copious spare time Lilia had apparently choreographed a new ballet for the Royal Ballet in London.

"You didn't think that I spent all my time on skating, did you?" she asked, her chin raised just a fraction higher than its usual elevation as she strode around the sitting room gathering her things together.

"No," mumbled Yuri, glancing up briefly from his mobile phone. It wasn't easy to show a _prima ballerina_ the respect she expected when you were in her apartment all the time. You had to relax once in a while. 

And it was almost impossible to relax at the moment. His tendons were tight enough to pluck like guitar strings. It was the off season; he was meant to be easing up on training, but staying home left him feeling itchy and anxious, wanting to crawl out of his own skin, an emptiness that he couldn't fill with all the schoolwork he was meant to be catching up on. Yakov had flatly banned Yuri from skating any more than the hours allotted in his training plan. In reaction to this, Yuri had started cheating on Yubileyny with a second rink, sneaking out to skate on his rest day while telling Yakov and Lilia that he was going to hang out on Nevsky Prospect. Of course he had been ratted out on social media after about three weeks. That had been a few days ago; Yuri still wasn't sure what the punishment was going to be.

"I'll be going to London," Lilia continued, addressing Potya, who had jumped up on the desk to see what she was doing. "To rehearse them. Yakov will look after Potya."

Yuri almost said _yeah sure_ before remembering something that Potya had apparently forgotten – Potya was _his_ cat, not Lilia's.

"You'll be coming with me as well," added Lilia as an afterthought, turning to face him. "It will be a change; I've arranged for you to join some Royal Ballet School classes. It will be good for you to get some perspective on things."

He sprang to his feet at that. "What? I don't need perspective! I need to _practice_! You can't just..."

Lilia raised one plucked eyebrow at him. "A ticket has been booked," she said, an elegant passive.

And the terrible thing was that there was nothing he could do about it. Yuri went over to the desk, gathered up a protesting Potya in his arms, and stomped off to his bedroom.

A day later he was at the airport being awkwardly but feelingly embraced by Yakov.

"No skating," said Yakov.

"How would I do that?" Yuri replied. "You wouldn't even let me _bring_ them."

He was at least used to leaving Potya, but his skates? He thought of them sitting abandoned, zipped tidily into their bag at the bottom of his closet, and felt the sickness of disloyalty.

However much he might have enjoyed his one day a week of rest – lying in bed till noon with Potya stretched across the duvet licking her paw, listening to the murmur of voices in the next room as Yakov and Lilia made scornful comments about politics over the morning papers – more than that seemed unthinkable.

"Like I'm going to go and skate on a shitty _rental_ pair," he added disdainfully, trying to cover the surge of panic that rose in him at the thought of being away from the ice for weeks on end. It tasted like stomach acid, that burn that came when you were gasping for air so desperately that your throat could no longer contain it.

He was already losing ground. He was still growing. Who knew what else he would have lost by the time he got back? And neither Yakov nor Lilia seemed to care.

Yakov grunted approvingly. 

"Enjoy yourself," he said.

Walking down the airbridge to board the plane, a stride or two ahead of Lilia, Yuri felt as if he were being marched into prison. She'd even taken his passport after they went through exit control. He was trapped. Welcome to hell.

***

Hands on his hips, Yuri stood on Bow Street and looked up disdainfully at the blank, flat, modern facade of the Royal Opera House.

"Is that it?" he asked. "It looks like the Mariinsky addition. How old is this place, anyway?"

"This part is older than you," said Lilia. "Which isn't saying much."

"I was expecting something older than you," shot back Yuri, "which is saying a lot."

Lilia smiled, a distinct compression of the lips that you had to know how to look for, put her hand on his shoulder and led him past the loading docks towards the Stage Door.

***

The _premier danseur_ of the Royal Ballet was gazing at Lilia as if he wanted to fuck her right there in the studio, once he got Yuri out of the way.

All morning Yuri had trailed around the Royal Opera House in Lilia's wake while she met the director of this and the choreographer of that, an extraneous, scowling boy in an oversized hoodie, slouching spiritually even if he didn't dare to do so in reality.

For better or worse, when he went to competitions, he was used to being the one that people were looking at. Almost all of his fans knew who Yakov was, and by now the real fans knew who Lilia was. Nonetheless, both of them were there for him, to yell at him and braid his hair and give him his skate guards and take his dirty tissues after he blew his nose. On the YouTube videos of Lilia's old performances, a steady stream of new comments proclaimed, _here b/c of Yuri Plisetsky!_ So it was strange, here at the Royal Opera House, to have been demoted to nothing more than a hanger-on. 

"And this is Yuri Plisetsky," said Lilia, when she remembered, and after that no one gave him a second glance. They were buried under an avalanche of 'I'm honoured to be working with you, Ms Baranovskaya' and 'Lilia, it's been so long,' and he wanted to shout at them 'don't you know that I'm the Ice Tiger of Russia, I won gold at the Grand Prix Final!' because he was pretty sure they all thought he was Lilia's idiot nephew or something. Because she couldn't be bothered to introduce him properly.

He had thought things would get better once all the excruciating official welcomes were over, once they got up to the studio and got to work. It only had gotten worse.

Yuri knew who Sergei Lisitsyn was. He'd read the guy's Wikipedia entry in the taxi from Heathrow, surreptitiously angling the screen so that Lilia wouldn't see what he was doing. _He was premier danseur at the Bolshoi Ballet from 2006 to 2010, perhaps best known as the last partner of Lilia Baranovskaya before her retirement. Since 2010 he has been premier danseur at the Royal Ballet. He made his debut as a choreographer in 2014, with..._

The YouTube videos he'd seen even earlier, back when he'd first started working with Lilia. He'd read through all the comments and quickly regretted it.

_they were the greatest_

_Absolute perfection <3 <3_

_Do you think they were sleeping together?_

_Totally. Look at the way they look at each other! Look at the way he touches her! #relationshipgoals_

_she was like 45 and he was 25, doesnt anyone else think its kinda gross? its practically pedophilia_

_No one else would have been good enough to be Lilia Baranovskaya's toyboy._

_Who's here because of Yuri Plisetsky??_

And the final comment was his, under the name of one of his many socks:

_anyone who's watching videos of Lilia Baranovskaya because of Yuri Plisetsky is a moron_

Yuri hated Sergei Lisitsyn from the moment he set eyes on him. He was a smug, arrogant jerk with a self-congratulatory smile. He was tall and muscular and moved like he felt every inch of it. He had a big cloud of curly hair, which he probably thought made him look _creative_ and _eccentric_ when it actually just said _hello I'm a giant douchebag._ And he must have known exactly how transparent his ballet tights were when he'd put them on that morning. In short, he was exactly like Victor. Yuri stuck his fists in his pockets and pledged eternal emnity.

Sergei greeted Lilia with a kiss on each cheek and then a third for good measure. "Lilyusha."

"Seryozhka. It's been too long." She looked him up and down appraisingly. "The Royal Ballet has obviously agreed with you."

"I made the best of a bad situation, not that I regret it. The Bolshoi just wasn't the same without you."

In comparison to his, Lilia's voice was distant. "Nothing stays the same," she said. "Clinging to the past is an act of weakness."

He laughed. "Yes, yes, the strong can reinvent themselves as many times as necessary. You see, I've remembered everything you taught me."

 _But that's what Lilia taught me,_ thought Yuri. It was strange to think of her saying the same things to someone else, back when he had still been a tiny boy.

"Everything," added Sergei, a lower tone.

 _Does Yakov know about this?_ Yuri wondered, outraged. _Yakov ought to know about this._

Not that he was in favour of Yakov and Lilia getting together or anything. It was disgusting and he didn't even want to _think_ about how he kept hearing Yakov sneaking out of her bedroom in the morning, like he thought he was fooling anyone. At the same time, it sort of made sense. They were both old, they'd been married before, they lived in the same place (with him), they had shared interests (him). He couldn't imagine them going out to nightclubs and he was 100% certain that neither of them had ever heard of VKontakt. So it stood to reason that if they didn't want to die sad and alone, they'd take the path of least resistance and end up with each other.

But this... this was perverse. On so many levels.

Meanwhile, Lilia and Sergei moved on to gossiping about lots of people Yuri didn't know. _And at the Mariinsky? I'd heard that Grisha... Well, that was what Rosa said, naturally, but the real story... That injury was such a waste, I could have told her... His technique is atrocious, I don't know why he has such a following..._

It figured that Yuri had been dragged all this way to London only to have to listen to Russians talking in Russian about Russian stuff. He folded his arms and coughed.

"This is Yura," said Lilia. "The one that I mentioned."

Sergei looked over his shoulder at Yuri, as if he'd noticed his presence for the first time. Then he smiled, but it wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of a man who has also sworn eternal emnity. "Your new favourite, Lilyusha? So you still like them young."

"Gross," said Yuri, _sotto voce_ commentary. 

He supposed he ought to be flattered that this guy thought of him as competition, even if it was only as an annoying little cockblocker. He could work with that. Cockblocking was one of his many talents, even if his greatest mission of all time (Hasetsu) had ultimately ended in failure.

"Yuri, since this discussion is obviously not of interest to you," said Lilia crisply, "why don't you go and spend the afternoon in Covent Garden. It will be your last free time for a while."

She went to her bag and pulled out a small envelope, its flap tucked in neatly. She handed it to him. "Buy yourself something. And save the receipts."

It was not an offer. It was an imperative. But Yuri looked doubtfully at Lilia; he didn't like the idea of leaving them unchaperoned.

"Well?" she said, folding her arms.

Yuri went.

***

Once out of the building, he leaned against the wall by the Stage Door and pulled the envelope out of his back pocket. Across the street, a couple of tiny aspiring ballerinas in tutus were posing for pictures outside the door to the Royal Ballet School. He didn't think they'd made the audition, somehow; his arabesque was better than theirs.

Inside the envelope he found £200 in crisp £20 notes. That was... a lot? He thought it was a lot. Pulling out his phone to check, he found that it actually was over 22,000 rubles. That wasn't just a lot, that was insane!

He wouldn't spend it. He'd take it home and give it to his grandad instead. If Lilia was disappointed, that was her problem; she shouldn't have given it to him if she didn't want him to do what he wanted with it.

His resolve lasted until he got out into the piazza and saw an amazing pair of black leather flatforms with silver studs in the window at Kurt Geiger. He didn't have any cool shoes at the moment; his feet had grown too fast. Yakov made sure that he wasn't actually barefoot – he had ordinary sneakers, and snow boots, and a pair of dressy shoes for banquets – but there was apparently no line item in the budget for awesome fashion.

He would just go inside and look at them. There was no harm in that.

They looked even more awesome from inside. He was just running a finger over the studs when one of the salesgirls approached him.

"We have some black leather trainers in the men's section," she said, pointing over her shoulder with her thumb. "Without the studs."

 _Fuck that,_ thought Yuri.

"I want these," he said firmly. "I'll take these."

His feeling of satisfaction lasted until he got to the till and had to count out all but one of the £20 notes. The shoes were £179. He could just imagine the salesgirl thinking, _oh, here comes another Russian oligarch._

 _I'm not like that,_ he wanted to say. _I'm not rich. I'm not... well, maybe I'm a little famous, but not that way._

He couldn't say that, of course. He took the handles of the bag when the girl presented them to him, and left the shop with his new shoes. He wondered whether he could return them – of course he could, she'd put the receipt right in the bag, but it would be so embarassing to go back in again. Maybe tomorrow.

The piazza was full of big school groups, teenagers with their backpacks sprawled out across the paving stones with their sandwiches and Cokes, chattering away without a care in the world. Yuri gazed at them all disdainfully; in comparison he felt ancient. He couldn't think of a single thing he had in common with them.

Now that the excitement of buying his shoes had faded away, he found himself remembering again what had happened upstairs, and feeling even more angry about it than he had at the time. He was so angry that he pulled out his phone and messaged Victor.

_Ugh he's trying to fuck her!!!!_

Annoyingly the reply came instantly. Because apparently Victor – who was often impossible to reach by text, phone or email – always had the time for really good gossip.

_Who?? Otabek???? I'm listening_

_Lilia. This Sergei guy. What about Yakov?! I mean, not like I care or anything_

For the longest time Victor's reply failed to resolve itself from the three-dotted _in parenthesis_ of a message being typed. Just when Yuri was about to swear and put the phone away again, it rang. He nearly dropped it.

"You have reached Yuri Nikolaievich's cockblocking services," he recited into the phone in flat, bored, over-loud Russian. Halfway across the plaza, an obviously Russian-speaking passerby turned to give him a surprised look. "Leave a message for someone who gives a fuck."

"Sergei Lisitsyn!" exclaimed Victor tinnily at the other end of the line. Like Yakov, he rarely had the patience for opening greetings unless he was trying to charm you into something.

"You know him?"

"Of course I do, I had to spend seven hours draped across him for a _Vanity Fair_ photoshoot in 2007. _Russia's new golden boys_. It was a cover and a two-page spread."

"Spare me your celebrity model anecdotes."

The worst thing was that Yuri had seen that picture before. Sergei Lisitsyn apparently had a long history with semi-transparent ballet tights. But at least, unlike Victor, he had actually been wearing tights.

"I know Sergei," said Victor, an assumed air of thinly stretched patience, "because I was still living with Yakov when he started partnering Lilia. Of course she was living in Moscow most of the year, but we stayed with her when I was in Rostelecom, and... yes, I saw enough of him."

"And?"

"You're not asking me for gossip, are you, Yurik?"

"Fuck you, old man. Are you so senile you don't even remember?"

Victor sighed. "Yes, I remember. They were partners. It was... intense. Lilia was old to be performing six nights a week; he was young, he wanted to prove himself. It was like they felt no one else could understand. Yakov and Lilia's marriage was already in trouble. I don't think it was why they got divorced, but it didn't help. Afterwards, they definitely had a bit of a fling."

"Well, he wants to have another one."

"You shouldn't sound so surprised. Lilia is still a very beautiful woman, you know."

"Whatever. You know she just gave me two hundred pounds to get out of her way for the afternoon?"

Unlike Yuri, this apparently didn't give Victor pause. Probably he could earn two hundred pounds just by smiling.

"I think she and Yakov just want you to enjoy yourself a little in London. Take a break from being so stressed about your skating."

Yuri couldn't help but wonder whether Yakov had actually said that to Victor. He had absolutely no right to talk about Yuri's personal business like that! Especially not to a competitor like Victor.

"But..." he began to protest.

"Or maybe she just wants you out of the way!" said Victor with a laugh, like he could relate. 

 _I wish I could pay £200 for you to stay out of my way_ , thought Yuri, forgetting that he'd called Victor in the first place.

***

Even after a year of intensive ballet training – and eleven years of ballet in total – Yuri still felt clumsy and out of place off the ice. 

Lilia had pulled untold strings to get him an invitation to join the morning classes at the Royal Ballet School. After listening to and repeating her strict instructions as to which exercises were off limits for him, he was allowed to stand at the back and do his best to absorb the rapid-fire corrections of the ballet mistress, an ugly duckling forced to paddle on dry land.

 _Whatever_ , he thought. _My double tour en l'air is perfect and they can just suck it._

He struggled. He struggled and fought and resented every last centimetre that measured the distance by which he failed. His flexibility was fading; he knew he wasn't alone, he was still the envy of most of the boys in the class, but that wasn't enough. The girls were better than him, every single one of them. He would never succeed in turning himself into Lilia's ideal prima ballerina now. 

He shouldn't have been bothered by that. He knew it had been only for a season, that he was now about to be called upon to die and reinvent himself yet again. Yet he couldn't help wanting to achieve what Lilia had asked of him.

The Royal Ballet School students were nothing like the school groups in Covent Garden. At sixteen, they were as focused and professional as him. Despite his growth spurt he felt tiny and skinny compared with the other boys of his age, almost all of whom were over 170 already. He wasn't yet keeping up with his growth. He was starving all the time, even removed from his usual training schedule at the rink. Every lunchtime he went with his classmates across the glass bridge to the ROH canteen and ate heaped plates of spaghetti carbonara with extra cheese on top, but it didn't seem to make any difference. 

He looked in the mirror and saw his cheekbones in relief, the sharp line of a jaw that was defined in a way it had never been before. An online English thesaurus gave the synonyms: _stretched out, attenuated, etiolated_. Butter scraped too thinly across bread, that was how he felt. It made him wonder whether there would be anything left of him by the time it stopped.

The other students were nicer to him, he thought, than he would have been in their place. He was an alien invader in their midst, the boys with their tidily-cut hair and the girls all with their perfect buns pinned in a twist that was distinctively RBS. Maybe it was just that he was too terrible to be mocked mercilessly. Maybe he carried a little bit of Lilia's reflected glory. 

She had known better than to deliver him to his first morning class – it would have been like he was a little boy, presenting a bouquet to his teacher with his mother at his side – but she stopped in after a few days to see how he was getting on. Even before he saw her, he could sense the shift in atmosphere, the dancers imperceptibly raising their chins and squaring their shoulders, the sudden sibilant whispers from the boys and girls at the edge of the room awaiting their turns. The fingers of the repetiteur stumbled over the keys. _Don't look, it's Lilia Baranovskaya._

It was late in the class, the combinations mostly beyond Yuri's ability. He spent a little while pretending to be absorbed in drinking from his water bottle. Then he sidled over to her.

"What are you doing here?" he said in English, just loudly enough to demonstrate to the rest of the class that he was unintimidated by her. "Aren't you busy or something?"

Before Lilia could answer, the piano had trailed to a respectful halt and the ballet mistress – sounding more than a little intimidated herself – was introducing the class to the Bolshoi's celebrated _prima ballerina assoluta._

"Don't interrupt yourselves on my account," said Lilia, hands on narrow hips. "I'm just here to observe Yuri's progress."

And there was another little rustle at that. Yuri slouched against the wall, took another drink of water. Why did she have to embarrass him like this? Couldn't they just pretend that they didn't know each other or something?

The ballet mistress was calling the class back to order, but no one could concentrate with Lilia in the room. They resumed and then trailed to a halt again, ragged and jittery. Lilia couldn't stand this sort of thing. She clapped her hands sharply; everyone stopped to look at her.

"No!" she said. "Watch carefully!"

And then she demonstrated herself, straight off the street, wearing a pair of heels. From somewhere there was the sound of an indrawn breath. Of course it wasn't the full sequence; she had only sketched it out. Nonetheless it was immaculate.

"There." An impatient gesture towards the repetiteur. "If you please. Again. раз, два..."

And the whole studio whirled into life around her.

***

It was fun, at least, taking a cab back to Highgate with Lilia at the end of the day. 

In Piter she didn't usually talk to him about her other students, her life outside of being his choreographer. In the studio he was her student, nothing more; at home she had Yakov to talk to. Their conversations swirled around him while he pretended not to listen, and often he didn't have to pretend. She kept a proper, rigorous distance from him; unlike Yakov, who sometimes liked to tell stories in the evenings about what it had been like skating for the USSR, Lilia was never anything close to what you might call confessional.

Even here, you couldn't call her confessional, but Yuri found that he had undergone a metamorphosis into something closer to an ally. After her rehearsals had finished for the day, she would come downstairs and come clipping across the floor of the cafe at a furious pace in her high-heeled boots. Yuri, nursing a Diet Coke in one of the alcoves while idly watching the TV with a closed-circuit feed from the stage, would look up and join her. They'd go out to Bow Street together to hail a cab, and she would be already be muttering under her breath about whatever stupidities she'd had to cope with today.

Once they got into the car, the curtain would go up and she'd be off in full flow.

"These English dancers! They think they can say, _no, I don't want it this way, I want it that way_! As if anyone in the building gives a damn what the _corps de ballet_ thinks! It's like they're figure skaters. Each one a _prima_ in her own head."

Yuri snorted in derision, which he guessed was the expected response. It must have been, because Lilia kept going:

"It's no wonder, when you think of what they call choreography around here. Christopher Wheeldon! Could not choreograph his way out of a paper bag. Expects his dancers to do it for him. Remind me to tell you about what happened when they commissioned him at the Bolshoi. Never again. Wayne McGregor! Very nice, but not ballet."

"Huh," said Yuri. "It's a good thing they've got you to whip them into shape."

He liked the idea of Lilia terrorizing the assembled Royal Ballet. In fact he liked the idea of Lilia terrorizing anyone other than him for a change.

"Hmm," said Lilia, her tone softening. "Yes."

She cast him a sidelong glance, like he had just paid her a great compliment and she didn't quite know how to respond.

"We shall see," she said, back to her more formal voice. "It's now up to them."

***

The Royal Ballet School girls did Yuri's hair for him in the morning.

All of them put their own hair up in a perfect French roll with an extra little twisted strand that was distinctively RBS. It was a school regulation or something. Yuri, whose hair was now nearly as long as the girls, had never really learned how to do anything with it at all. Ordinarily, when he was practicing, he just wore it in a ponytail; Lilia braided it elaborately for him before competitions, but it wasn't like she was going to do that every day.

So the girls in his class had half-jokingly started doing it for him while they were stretching before morning class, sharing the task between them like he was a pet or a mascot to them. He put up with their amusement and they put up with his bad language like it was just a Russian thing. Which it probably was.

"You know her?" Chloe asked the day after Lilia's visit, her careful fingers insinuating themselves to collect the soft hairs at the nape of his neck. "Lilia Baranovskaya? She's actually your teacher?"

"My choreographer," Yuri corrected, fighting off a ticklish shiver. "Yeah, I guess I know her, I live in her fucking apartment."

"Why?" said Emma, who had an ethereal elegance to her but was frankly a little stupid. After that she put her forehead to the floor and concentrated on her split.

"Because they're getting me ready for the Olympics." This was perhaps a stretch but Yuri felt it was a warranted exaggeration. "Lilia and Yakov, my coach. I'm going to win gold at Pyeongchang. Otherwise it would be a waste of their time."

"Imagine moving in with Sergei Lisitsyn!" exclaimed Mingxia. "Because he wanted to give you _personal coaching_!"

A collective _frisson_ ran through the group, apart from Yuri, who just shuddered.

"He's a piece of shit," he said without thinking. "Ow, Chloe, stop pulling my hair."

"What?" said Mingxia. " _Why_?"

This was a slightly more sophisticated _why_. He liked the way she curled her lip when she said things like that. Or maybe he liked the fact that she was from Heihe, across the Amur River from Siberia, which was the arse end of fucking nowhere and meant that she spoke a little Russian. Yuri could relate, in the sense of having grown up in a nowhere suburb of Moscow.

"Is it true," said Chloe, finishing off his French roll with a careless jab of a bobby pin, "that he used to be her lover?"

"How would I know that?"

"Oooh," said Emma, who despite her lack of two brain cells to rub together had a talent for scenting blood. "Is it?"

"I mean, really, how the hell would I know that? I bet you're one of those morons who leaves comments on their _Swan Lake_ on YouTube. I bet you write _fan fiction_."

"You don't have to be nasty about it," said Emma and subsided into another split. And she added, mouth muffled against her ankle: "Anyway, I don't."

"Well, he's a piece of shit," said Yuri. "That I do know."

***

Mingxia took some pictures of him messing around at the barre at the end of morning class, wanting to illustrate his new hairstyle. In one of them he was doing a _développé à la seconde_ , and he'd gotten his free leg a lot higher than he'd realised at the time. It looked OK, so he thought he'd put it on Instagram. His social media had been a black hole since he'd arrived in London, it was probably time to post something.

 _At the Royal Ballet School,_ he captioned it, lacking inspiration. _#notbadforaskater_

One of the first comments was from Otabek: _Still with the eyes of a soldier._ By lunchtime, the photo also had a 'like' from Katsuki. He didn't even think Katsuki looked at Instagram; it would have been a pretty great compliment if it had actually come from Katsuki – who knew his ballet – but probably Victor had just stolen his phone or something.

Yuri didn't think any more about it until they were leaving at the end of the day. He could hear the screams before he even walked out the door; he would have known those piercing shrieks and squeals anywhere.

"They're at the wrong door," Emma was saying, just ahead of him. "They must think it's Stage Door, but..."

"Crap," said Yuri to Jason, one of the boys in his class. "It's my fans."

It wasn't like he actually needed to say this. If all the girls shouting "Yuri!!!" weren't enough, the president of his UK fan club had actually gone to the trouble of bringing along the big banner, the one with his name in Cyrillic and the cat ears. It was mortifying. Kind of. 

_Like you didn't know this was going to happen as soon as you said where you were online._

"What the hell?" said Jason. "They're _your_ fans? Are you that famous?"

"Uh, sort of," said Yuri, who had already started grabbing for pens and signing autographs. "But only because they're insane."

"Yuri!" said Sasha, the UK fan club president, who sometimes seemed to know his calendar better than he did. She waved and jumped up and down a couple of times, just to make sure he'd spotted her. "We didn't know you were coming to London with Lilia!"

Yuri leaned in for a selfie with some random fan, tried to smile. "She dragged me here. I was kidnapped."

"Are you going to skate? Are you doing any shows while you're here?"

Like he would actually be planning to make some surprise appearance at _Third-Rate Washed-Up British Skaters on Ice_ or whatever. They wouldn't be able to pay him enough for that sort of humiliation. (Literally. He was totally willing to humiliate himself for money, but he didn't think they had the budget.)

Another selfie, another fan. That girl didn't want to let go of him afterwards. "No. I don't even have my skates. I'm meant to be taking a break and working on my ballet."

"If you're looking for a rink, not for serious practice or anything but just to get on the ice, I–"

"Thanks, but no."

Lilia would be proud of how polite he was with his fans now, thought Yuri. Every time he wanted to say _fuck off already,_ he would hear her voice in his head: _Yuri Plisetsky, don't use unattractive words._  

Sasha wasn't so bad; at least she didn't get grabby with him. Neither did the woman, more than old enough to be his mother, who had started turning up at all his European events with flowers.

"I haven't even performed," he said, bemused, as she handed over a massive bouquet of zinnias.

"I know," she said, "but it's so wonderful to see you here in England! Good luck next year, Yuri!"

"Thanks," he said, and that was that. She melted back into the crowd, apparently satisfied.

What did they actually want from him? That was what he asked himself. Sex, money, a laying on of hands that would result in the miraculous ability to do quads? Sometimes it seemed that all they wanted was just for him to look at them and know they existed. 

It wasn't much – and yet he still wasn't very good at doing it. He felt a bit useless sometimes, really.

***

Even worse than the Yuri's Angels was lying in wait for him the following day. Yuri walked around a corner inside the Opera House and ran smack into Victor Nikiforov waiting for the lift in Blue Core. Sometimes he thought that what he needed was not so much a quad lutz as an exorcism.

"What the fuck are you doing here, old man?"

"Yura! Hello, fancy meeting you here!" Victor leaned over and and kissed him on both cheeks. "I'm working on my choreography for next season."

"Why do you have to come to London to do that? Why do you have to come _here_ to do that?"

Victor looked faintly pitying. "Because I'm working with Wayne McGregor."

Whoever that was. 

"I've got enough insane people stalking me already. Just stay out of my business, OK?"

"Don't worry, I have plenty to do! Besides, the press will be following me now instead of you. I'm doing you a favour."

The press hadn't been following Yuri to start with, but he didn't say this. Certainly they would be following Victor. Although Yuri took the prize for rabid nutcase fans, Victor was a _celebrity_. People didn't just stalk him on Instagram: they expected to be able to read about him in proper magazines and newspapers, like anything he did was actually news. Victor Nikiforov being in London was certainly news. But...

"You didn't come because of Lilia, did you?"

"Lilia?" said Victor, tilting his head like he had no idea what Yuri was talking about.

Nevertheless Yuri wondered. He wondered even more the next day when, on the way back from lunch, he happened to walk past the door of the ballet rest area and saw Victor arguing with Sergei Lisitsyn. There was a glass panel in the door; you could just about see without being conspicuous. Ordinarily you couldn't hear anything at all but the raised voices carried a little.

They were really getting into each other's faces. Sergei was actually stabbing his finger into Victor's chest. Victor just grabbed Sergei's hand by the wrist and held it disdainfully up to the side like he couldn't even be bothered with such irrelevancies. It was the sort of treatment that he gave Yuri when he got overly pushy, except that Sergei was a grown man, and beside him Victor looked slight.

Yuri was immensely gratified. Sure, he did hate Victor, but when it came to the glory of Yakov's team he was glad to have Victor on side.

It was just infuriating that he couldn't hear properly. He crouched down beside the door, hoping that a little sound might carry through the little gap between it and the carpet. No good.

All he could make out was a final, parting riposte from Sergei. "Wayne McGregor!"

In his heart though, Yuri knew – he just knew – that they were arguing about Lilia.

***

Nothing could save Yuri from the inevitable paparazzi shot with Victor outside the Stage Door that evening. He'd agreed to let Victor take him to dinner, because it seemed simpler than saying "no," and more interesting than having the usual carefully measured meal with Lilia in the flat she was borrowing from a friend in Highgate.

The price he had to pay was blinking in the dazzle of a wave of flash photography while Victor, in his element, stood there in his sunglasses calmly taking questions about his trip to London. Yuri folded his arms and sighed, but it didn't last too long. Eventually Victor put a hand on Yuri's shoulder and said, "now that I've answered your questions, I hope you'll give us some peace and quiet for the rest of the evening."

Amazingly it just about seemed to work. Victor strode off, cutting a path through the evening crowds of Covent Garden. Yuri followed; it wasn't as difficult to keep up with Victor as it had been once. He could almost match strides with him now. He pushed a little bit ahead so that he could actually walk next to Victor rather than – as usual – following in his wake. Yuri squared his shoulders. People could just get out of their way.

"Hey, where are we going?" he asked. "I thought we could go to Honest Burger, they have really good..."

He still hadn't gotten over having to pay 1500 rubles for a burger, but if Victor was paying then it seemed like a good idea. He'd been craving them ever since the last time; he would wake up at night dreaming about meat cooked juicy and rare. He wondered whether he was anemic or something. Maybe he would ask the doctor when he got back to Russia, before his next blood test.

"I'm taking you to The Ivy," said Victor. "No one will ask me for an autograph there." 

Unsurprisingly it was a devastatingly swanky restaurant, not so far from Covent Garden, the sort of place where British oligarchs probably went. It was buzzy and crowded, full of people decades older than Yuri – and in fact decades older than Victor too. Yuri pushed his way through the door in front of Victor, just daring the _maitre d'_ to take a look at his warm-up shirt and ratty leggings and toss him out onto the street again. A moment's cloud passed over the man's face; then he focused on Victor.

"Hello!" said Victor, giving his most charming smile as he pulled off his sunglasses. "I'm Victor Nikiforov! A table for two? Somewhere quiet?"

Of course he didn't have reservations. And of course, after a few minutes – _my apologies for the wait, Mr Nikiforov,_ _if you'd like to order a complimentary cocktail at the bar...?_ – they managed to find them a table anyway. It was even out of the way, in a corner next to a couple of people who were going on about movie financing deals and tax incentives and didn't even give Victor a second glance.

Victor sank into the banquette with a happy sigh and accepted a menu.

"Shall we have a bottle of wine?" he asked Yuri. "I think we should have some wine."

"Am I even old enough to drink here?"

"If you're not, I guess they'll tell us!"

"Fine, whatever," said Yuri. He frowned at the menu. The prices were... it wasn't even worth thinking about the prices. But at least he could get a burger.

"I'm not going to pay for you to eat a burger here," singsonged Victor, as if reading his mind. "Pick something else."

"But it has dill relish!"

Victor smiled his meanest, least negotiable smile. "How Russian of you. Pick something else."

Out of spite Yuri ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, which was a steak. At least his craving for red bloody meat wouldn't go unsatisfied. And he ordered it with dill relish, because fuck Victor and this stupid pretentious restaurant. Annoyingly Victor didn't even blink; he just ordered about 6000 starters on top of it, saying that they could try a little of everything. 

When the waiter brought the wine, he didn't blink either, just poured out a glass for Victor and (once Victor had nodded his approval) for Yuri as well. 

 _Huh_ , thought Yuri, _I guess I don't look fourteen anymore._ _I guess there are some good things about growing._

" _Cheers_!" said Victor in English, holding up his glass to toast. "By the way, those shoes you're wearing are really cool!"

"Yeah, I shouldn't have bought them. It was Lilia's money. I was going to give it to grandad."

"How much?"

Yuri sucked in a breath. "They were like 22,000 rubles."

"Oh, not that bad!" said Victor cheerfully.

"Fuck you Victor. I'm not you. Not everyone can afford to splash around money like, like..."

"You'll be able to soon."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Victor gave Yuri a look as if he was missing something obvious.

"Yura, you're sixteen. You're one of Russia's top skaters and your fans are even more obsessed than mine! You have an international following; thanks to Hot Springs on Ice they love you in Japan. You're going to start getting offered big endorsements soon, if you haven't already."

"Well, yeah, I mean, I get all the stuff from Bosco...."

Was that a pitying look from Victor?

" _Big_ endorsements, Yura, personal endorsements, the sort of endorsements I get. Modelling, if you want to. If you haven't noticed, you're growing up to be very good looking! You have the face for it – and obviously the body to match. People are going to want you on their campaigns."

This was excruciating. The guy at the next table, who had been going on about guaranteed minimums, gave Victor a very doubtful look.

"If you say another word about my body," said Yuri in a low voice, "I'm going to break your nose. I mean it."

It was weird because he was used to hearing about his body all day – from Yakov, from Lilia, from Victor and his fellow skaters whether he liked it or not. Hamstrings, glutes, core, illotibial band, it never ended. He was used to being poked, prodded, shaken, grabbed and forcibly manuvered into position when he was doing something wrong. He was measured and weighed to the gram, told to eat more protein or less, told to do more squats and fewer crunches or the reverse, told exactly how he was falling short from the form he needed. It wasn't embarassing, it was perfectly impersonal. But they never talked like Victor was talking now.

"Speaking completely without personal interest, of course!" said Victor. "But somebody has to say this to you. Yakov is a great coach and a good manager, but he's not interested in the business side of things. Your grandfather probably doesn't know anything about it either. You need to start thinking of yourself as an asset. Your looks and your talent are both part of the package you're selling. You."

Yuri noted that Victor hadn't said anything about selling his personality. 

"Do you have any idea how fucking depressing that sounds?"

"Yes," said Victor, looking a little sad. "But you're not going to make any money out of skating. You spend all your winnings on coaching fees, scrape a living on ice shows – and what do you have to show for it when you retire? However much you can get for your gold medals. Arthritis. Nothing."

"Yeah," said Yuri, pondering.

He'd never thought about it like that. For years he'd dreamt about defeating Victor on the ice while resenting everything he stood for: the designer labels, the magazine covers, the perfectly calculated smile in all the paparazzi shots, the ridiculous wealth, the easy superiority over ordinary people. Unlike Yuri and his grandad, he never had to worry for a second about anything – not the rent, not the heating, none of it. 

 _And this is why,_ thought Yuri, a sudden epiphany. _He decided he was going to win at life, and he did it. He did._

His mind reeled slightly at the prospect, as if he'd just come off the ice after his free skate only to be told that there was a third scored program still to come, one that no one had ever mentioned to him before. Another arena, another podium entirely, another way for him to be measured against Victor and found wanting.

 _I don't want to be the next Victor Nikiforov_ , he thought furiously. _I don't, I don't. I'd rather die._

"So," he said, swallowing hard. "What do I do?"

Victor beamed proudly. "You don't have to figure it out by yourself! I'll give your number to my agent and my publicist. They'd love to talk to you about all of this and give you some advice."

"OK," said Yuri. "I guess. Maybe."

_We'll see how much they care once I crash and burn next season._

Oddly, he found the thought reassuring. Either he would become the next Victor Nikiforov or he would be saved from becoming the next Victor Nikiforov by going down in flames. Fate would decide for him. There was no middle ground.

***

After two glasses of wine and the best rare steak he'd ever eaten in his life, Yuri was feeling much more at peace with life. It wasn't so bad going out to dinner with Victor. You felt important; the food was great. And Victor was actually paying attention for once.

"This fois gras is really good. I like the blackberries. Can we get more?"

"Of course!"

With a flick of Victor's hand – he gestured the same way he did on the ice, as if he could never stop performing – the waiter wafted over, and five minutes later there was more fois gras. It was like magic.

Digging into the second plate of fois gras and pouring himself just a little more wine, Yuri remembered that there was something he'd been meaning to ask Victor.

"So what the fuck was that about? In the ballet rest area this afternoon?"

Victor smiled a brilliant smile. "It was lovely to see Seryozha again."

 _Wow,_ thought Yuri, _he loathes him! He really does!_

It was amazing. It was the greatest thing he'd heard in ages. He loved Victor.

"And?"

"And what do they say in the world of diplomacy? _A free and frank exchange of views?_ "

"About what, dickhead?"

He meant it affectionately; Victor knew that.

Victor put a finger to his lips. "I probably shouldn't say."

"That's not fair!"

"Really?"

"No. You have to say."

"You're drunk, Yura."

Yuri grinned. He was. "And whose fault is that?"

"There's only one possible way I can repay you," said Victor, studying the menu, "and that's by buying you dessert. Do you like the sound of the pina colada rum baba? Or the baked Alaska for two? Or both?"

They had both. Then Victor had brandy, and he let Yuri sneak a few sips.

In the dark blue afterglow of an early summer twilight in London – it couldn't have been much later than 11pm – Yuri stood outside the restaurant trying to balance on the edge of the curb while Victor hailed a taxi. It was surprisingly difficult, much harder than keeping your balance on skates; he fell off at least three times before a cab finally pulled up. It was only then that he remembered he hadn't succeeded in getting anything out of Victor about Sergei Lisitsyn.

"That was a great evening," said Victor, opening the door and helping Yuri in. "If only Yuri had been here!"

"I am here," said Yuri. Then he realised who had Victor meant.

"We could go to a club," he added hopefully. "We don't need Katsudon."

"I don't think so." Victor handed some money to the cabbie and gave him an address. "You're going straight back to Lilia's. I'll call her; she'll be looking out for you."

"But..." began Yuri.

Before he could say any more, Victor had shut the door. The cab drove off with Yuri in it.

***

Yuri didn't make it to class the next day. 

He spent the whole morning bent double over the toilet, barfing up absolutely everything that he'd eaten the previous day. In reverse order. He never wanted to see a piece of fois gras again, the rum baba was sickly and disgusting, and there was nothing worse than the feeling of half-digested steak catching in your throat on the way back up. Once all the food was gone, he was left with bile, which was even worse. He gagged until sweat rolled down his forehead and tears streamed from his eyes.

Clearly this was all part of Victor's long-term plan to sabotage his Olympic hopes. He saw it now.

By the afternoon he was feeling a bit better and had graduated to lying on the couch with the curtains shut watching terrible British soap operas. He was expecting the mother of all tellings-off from Lilia when she got back from Covent Garden, but after she put her hand on his forehead she just made him drink a glass of water and swallow a raw egg with some pepper and chili powder sprinkled on top. It wasn't too bad. Then she went to call Victor.

This was exactly the morale boost Yuri needed. He lay on the couch with the wet cloth Lilia had brought him draped over his eyes, listening to her shouting into the phone in the next room.

"Victor Nikiforov, you are twenty-eight years old! I had thought that you were finally capable of behaving like a responsible adult, but clearly I was mistaken! I am disappointed in you!"

Yuri smiled weakly. It had been worth it after all.

***

Lilia wasn't just in London as a choreographer, a fact she had entirely failed to mention to Yuri. In fact the Royal Opera House was putting on a whole gala evening, _A Celebration of Lilia Baranovskaya._ It would be a triple bill: Lilia's new ballet; a ballet that had been choreographed for her when she was _prima_ at the Bolshoi; and, finally, a _pas de deux_ that she would dance with her old partner Sergei Lisitsyn.

Not just any _pas de deux_. The Black Swan _pas de deux_ , which had apparently been their thing or something.

Yuri had never seen her perform before. In class she would sketch out examples of all the things she could still do better than anyone – the shape of an arm, the flow of a turn – and then break off before the big leap saying "and so on," like the rest of it ought to be obvious. Like she could have done it if she wanted to, but she just couldn't be bothered.

Yuri wondered whether Victor would go on doing exhibitions long after he had gone grey. He wondered how old Lilia was, exactly; he could have checked on Wikipedia but really he didn't want to know. It was clear she was ancient, certainly over fifty. Too old to be dancing still.

No one else seemed to share his doubts. There were posters everywhere in the Tube advertising the gala, banner headlines on the ROH website, articles in all the papers outlining her career – with only the briefest, cursory mention of her afterlife as a choreographer for skaters, and no mention of Yuri at all. People started camping out days early for tickets, lining the edge of Covent Garden like refugees with their sleeping bags and their thermoses. It seemed a pity: no doubt they were all longing to imagine her in her glory days, rather than to see her as she was now. 

A couple of days before the gala, Yuri stuck his head into the studio opposite the Staff and Artists Restaurant, meaning to ask Lilia about something. As soon as he saw her, he forgot what it was. She was just finishing a rehearsal of the _pas de deux_ , but Sergei had gone and she was continuing alone. It had been, obviously, a difficult rehearsal.

She was facing away from him, stripped down to a leotard and tights. She was as thin as any of the girls with whom Yuri danced at the Royal Ballet School, every vertebra visible at the nape of her neck, her shoulderblades visibly standing out as she flexed her arms. But the skin over the bones was dry and pale, slightly loose and creased, like worn tissue paper.

She was running one sequence over and over again, the step sequence from the opening of the _pas de deux_. Runs of little steps interspersed with jumps and static _attitudes derrière._ You could see the slight wobble as she balanced on pointe, never quite achieving the perfect stillness that she sought. It was impressive enough that she was doing it at all. Only clearly for her it wasn't.

Yuri could almost hear her voice in his head: _We are not satisfied with good enough, Yura. We are after perfection. Do it again._

Lilia performed the sequence again and again until the sweat beaded on her skin and her ribcage heaved with every laboured breath.

_Still not good enough._

She was as pitiless with herself as she was with him. More so. With herself, Yuri knew that she would never relent.

_Still not good enough._

Yuri didn't want to see. He backed quietly out the door again, hoping that she had never noticed he was there. If she had, she showed no sign of it.

And he had too much respect for her to ever admit that he had seen her like this.

***

Yuri went to the gala with a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if he were at one of his own competitions. He watched the first two ballets in a daze; when the lights went up for the second interval he realised that Lilia would ask him what he had thought of them, and that he wouldn't be able to remember a thing.

He went out to the terrace hoping for some air, but it was packed with people, all holding their drinks and their finger sandwiches and chattering incessantly to one another: _Lilia Baranovskaya, Lilia Baranovskaya._ Yuri was certain they would have been chattering exactly the same way if they'd been at the Coliseum in Rome waiting for some poor fuck to be thrown to the lions. _What a lovely evening out!_ they would say. _Isn't the weather nice?_

Anyway, he couldn't stand the terrace. It was barbaric. He shoved his way back through the crowds again, ignoring an actual bitten-off swear from an enormous woman in floral print who obviously thought it was his fault that she'd spilled her white wine. If she was so concerned about it, she shouldn't have been holding it in his way, obviously.

Having gotten back to his seat ridiculously early, he then had to get to his feet every time someone wanted to push past. It really pissed him off, people coming in this late. It was like they thought they were there to get drunk and enjoy the view, not to see an actual fucking work of art performed by someone who had literally sweated and bled for it, someone who had more talent in her little toe – not even her little finger – than they could hope to see in the whole of their miserable existence. People were such philistines.

Yuri sat down again, his nails biting crescents into the palms of his hands. Almost against his will he said a quick prayer – _lord have mercy, lord have mercy, lord have mercy_ – though he knew that Lilia needed no mercy and would want none.

When the lights went down, a terrifying, expectant hush spread over the whole of the theatre. The curtain went up and there was Sergei Litsitsyn, poised with his hand in the air, wearing a glittery pale top and those stupid off-white ballet tights. Lilia made her entrance all in black, her narrow arms curving with the music's first flourish in a perfect _port de bras_. From Yuri's seat in the front row of the amphitheatre, it was impossible to tell that they weren't of an age.

She launched immediately into the sequence that he had seen her practicing only a few days before. Only it wasn't the same. The magic of the performance had descended and Lilia had transformed herself, body and soul, into the black swan Odile. It was immaculate.

Yuri let out a slow breath. A moment later he had forgotten that he had ever been afraid.

With Lilia in his arms, Sergei Lisitsyn faded into the backdrop. He moved with her, their every breath taken in unison, but it was only the enchantment. Lilia's magic covered him too, made him into something more than he was.

Although he must have known that no one was there to see him, he danced his solos as if he thought that he could jump high enough and gesture grandly enough to take anyone's eyes from Lilia for a moment. It was pathetic. So were his _tours en l'air_ , thought Yuri.

Once Lilia reappeared on centre stage, the world fell away again. She had replaced the legendary thirty-two _fouettés_ with a _manège_ sequence, _piqué_ and _chaîné_ turns each running into the next with such speed that the eye could barely follow, every fourth a double. She was a whirlwind. She was gorgeous, unassailable, inhuman. She was everything Yuri wanted to be.

 _Maybe she can transform me as well,_ he thought. _Maybe she still can._

As the music ripped itself into a crescendo, Lilia threw herself into Sergei's arms, leapt into a high lift. On the final chord she threw her head back in a perfect, transcendent arabesque. And the lights fell.

Yuri's chest ached with wanting. He could taste it, the edge of blood palpable in his mouth from a bitten cheek. When the lights came up again, he applauded until his hands burned, losing himself in the rapture of the audience. There was curtain call after curtain call, ten minutes or more, a tribute that even Victor at the height of his powers had never received. Yuri promised himself that he would fight anyone online who said that she should have done the  _fouettés._

There were so many flowers thrown onto the stage that it looked like Lilia was walking through multicolored snowdrifts as she took her bows. Both she and Yuri went back to Highgate that night in the taxi with their arms filled to bursting with bouquets, and ten times as many left behind in her dressing room.

She didn't say anything, she didn't ask him what he thought of the performance; she only gazed out the window at the passing streetlights, her lips ghosting a few syllables as if she were recalling a combination of steps.

"I want to skate to _Swan Lake_ ," said Yuri finally, unable to bear the silence. "Next year."

All his life he had skated to ballet compositions – all of Yakov's skaters did – but in the lingering magic of the performance the suggestion sounded absurd, a travesty.

Lilia startled very slightly, as if she'd forgotten he was even in the car. "Perhaps."

"But not like Sergei Maximovich. Like you."

"Oh?"

To have complimented Lilia would have felt like presumption of the highest order. So he insulted Sergei Lisitsyn instead.

"Those double _tours_. Those shitty arabesques afterwards. You should send him to Yakov; Yakov wouldn't let him get away with that."

Then Lilia actually smiled.

"No," she said quietly, "you're right. He wouldn't. I'll tell Sergei you said so."

That was the moment that Yuri realised everything was going to be all right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know nothing about ballet, though I've done my best. If I've got any of the terminology wrong, please feel free to correct me.
> 
> [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE8mkVxH7P4) is the version of the Black Swan _pas de deux_ on which I've based Lilia and Sergei's performance. It's Maya Plisetskaya, Lilia's original, dancing the Black Swan aged forty-eight. Given the miraculous qualities of the YoI-verse, I figured that Lilia could manage it despite being a few years older.
> 
> If you want to read more about the [thirty-two fouettes](http://ballettothepeople.com/2015/12/21/can-we-kiss-those-fouettes-goodbye/).
> 
> The Royal Ballet School has generously shared a video on [how to do their signature hairstyle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDMWGaOQ4YA).


	4. Chapter 4

**August 2016**

Every summer Yuri spent a few days with his grandad in Moscow.

He loved the visits, or he would have loved them if they didn't involve going to Lubertsy, which you would only call the arse end of Moscow if you were generous enough to agree that it was _in_ Moscow in the first place.

These days he flew into Domdedovo and took a taxi from the airport, if grandad wasn't able to pick him up. Grandad was at work all day, so if Yuri wanted to do anything other than stare at the walls in the little one-bedroom flat where he had once lived, he had to flag down one of the swarming private minibuses that plied the streets, their destinations pasted crookedly in the window, and pay his 35 rubles to get to the metro station in Kotelniki, the very end of the line. He would slouch in the back seat, hood pulled low over his forehead, hoping to God that no one recognised him from the TV.

Victor Nikiforov would have had a fucking driver with a fucking Mercedes E-class.

The really ridiculous thing was that everyone said how _great_ Lubertsy was these days. They had a big new shopping centre with an IKEA, and somewhere there was even an outlet mall where you could spend his grandad's weekly wage to buy one of the Bosco Sport Team Russia jackets that Yuri got given for free. Even the metro at Kotelniki was brand new.

One of his friends from school, from before he'd moved away to St. Petersburg, had learned enough English that he'd got a job at the information desk at the shopping centre. Ilya had hopes of being hired as a trainee at one of the posh tourist hotels in the middle of Moscow, and even if he had to travel three hours round trip to work every day, it would be worth it because of all the tips from rich foreigners who had no idea what 500 rubles was actually worth. Someday he might even become a manager.

And God, Lubertsy was better, so much better, than when Yuri had been a boy. Even at sixteen he was already old enough to see that. But he couldn't appreciate it because now he knew what things were like outside, away from the rows and rows of tower blocks stitched together by eight-lane highways. When he was competing, he _stayed_ in the tourist hotels, watching Victor scatter tips and smiles to the bartenders and the concierges and the people who picked up your plate in the breakfast room like so much worthless confetti. When he was in St. Petersburg, he lived with Lilia and Yakov in an elegant eighteenth-century apartment on the Griboyedov Canal, full of antiques that were probably just as old as the apartment itself. When he was training, he drove with Yakov to the rink in the Mercedes that Victor had bought Yakov as a gift after his first Olympic gold.

And if Yuri crashed and burned as a skater, it would go away instantly. All of it.

No qualifications (apart from a stupid coaching qualification), no skills (apart from English, which didn't count because anyone who mattered spoke English now), nowhere to go but Lubertsy. Fucking grim. It was almost enough to make him understand why his mother couldn't exist without sticking a needle in her veins. Almost.

"What are you thinking about, idiot?" asked Ilya, buying a Coke from the little kiosk by the metro station.

"Nothing," said Yuri, abruptly jerked back to the present.

"You want to go see a movie? We've got this whole big cinema complex now..."

"Shut up about your shitty cinema complex, you sound like a walking advertisement. Who cares?"

He'd meant it to sound like friendly joking, like Ilya had called him _idiot_ , but he knew as soon as he spoke that his voice and his words carried too much of the ring of truth. To try to save the moment, he gave Ilya a friendly body check with his shoulder, but it was too late.

"All right," said Ilya sarcastically, "why don't we score some _krokodil_ then?"

"Come on, don't be..."

"Well, you were..."

"Shit," said Yuri. "This is stupid."

Ilya, who remembered him from when he was a skinny, puny kid with no father and practically no mother, took a deep breath. "Look, I'm here all the time. What do _you_ want to do?"

Really Yuri thought he wanted to go to the Tretyakov Gallery. A few weeks earlier Georgi had taken him to the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg in search of what he called 'aesthetic inspiration,' which for him seemed to involve staring at various paintings of imperious nineteenth-century women wearing fur and sitting in sleighs and declaring that they looked like Anya. But Yuri had been weirdly fascinated by the old paintings of peasant women, all covered in shawls of red and hot pink, and the way they swirled when they were dancing. He wondered if there were more of those paintings in the Tretyakov, and if you could maybe make a costume or a routine out of it.

But he couldn't say this to Ilya, because he knew that Ilya would laugh at him.

"Do you still skateboard?" he said instead. "What about the skate park?"

"Sure."

It was a hot day, a lot hotter than it had been in St Petersburg. The sun beat down on the treeless expanses of pavement around the metro station. Yuri pushed back the hood of the anonymous, definitely not Team Russia hoodie he'd brought along especially to wear in Lyubertsy, grabbed the bottle of Coke from Ilya and took a swig.

"Son of a bitch!" said Ilya. "Your hair! Don't you ever cut it in St Petersburg?"

"Aesthetics," said Yuri and shrugged. He'd forgotten about it; it came down past his shoulders now. "It looks better."

Ilya studied him. "Does it?"

"On ice, moron."

"Oh." You couldn't argue with this, really. What did Ilya know about what looked good on ice? "Let's go to the skate park."

"Yeah."

As they walked to the bus stop, Yuri could sense out of the corner of his eye a couple of girls watching him. Over the past year, ever since he'd won the Junior Grand Prix, he'd gotten good at spotting them. You never knew when some crazy might try to feel you up or throw a cat plushie at you or whatever.

"Is that Yuri Plisetsky?" said one of them, a hushed sort of awe.

"Don't be stupid," said the other. "What would he be doing _here_?"

It was a good idea to go to the skate park. It was something to do, something simple to talk about. Nothing had changed here apart from the graffiti.

Once upon a time, before he'd given all of that up, Yuri had been pretty decent on a skateboard. He still had all the balance. He had even better form, his fitness finely honed by a team of coaches and trainers and physios – not to mention ballet with Lilia. And his vertical jump was frankly awesome, if he did say so himself. (And even if, as he was painfully aware, it was still not quite as high as Victor's.)

The only problem was that he kept forgetting about the fucking skateboard.

He'd be sailing through the air, thinking how great it was that he actually got to land on the flat rubber soles of his Vans instead of a pair of knife shoes, and then all of a sudden it was _oh fuck which way did the board go?_ And if he was lucky he'd land on his feet without the board, like a cat. If he wasn't lucky he'd half catch the board, have it slide out from under him and then go slamming into the rough pavement, thinking wistfully about the feeling of nice, smooth ice on a freshly resurfaced rink. Ice also helped to numb the pain once you'd fallen.

Ilya winced. "OK?"

"Yeah, that was nothing," he said, getting up and dusting himself off. It hurt like a bitch but he wasn't going to show it. "Fine."

He'd had plenty of practice falling, after all. Hitting the ground was easy. Getting up gracefully afterwards looking like nothing had happened, and carrying on the routine in perfect time – that took a real man.

After a while he got sick of being a shitty skateboarder – not that he was any worse than Ilya – and started messing around instead. He'd ollie down a flight of stairs, let the board go sailing off in whichever direction it wanted, and concentrate on his jump instead. Although it was impossible to get much in the way of rotation off a skateboard, it turned out that you could pull off a pretty decent split jump. And, putting jumps to one side, doing a Biellman spiral on a skateboard was practically easier than it was on skates.

It was probably an asshole thing to do, but then he was an asshole, wasn't he? And he was tired, so tired, of being shit at everything he touched.

It worked, in the sense that everyone in the skate park stopped what they were doing to watch him. Which he supposed he must have wanted, or he wouldn't have done it, would he? Yeah. He was the best, and they were going to know he was the best, even if this was only a nothing little skate park in Lyubertsy.

Someone had portable speakers. They were playing that "Martini" song, which he hated, but it had a beat and he could dance to it. So he did.

It wasn't anything fancy. Nothing like ballet; not even breakdancing, which he'd sworn off forever after _that_ banquet. Just some spins, a little bit of hipshaking, a lot of arm movement (too much probably), a high kick or two. He did throw in a backflip, which he wasn't strictly speaking meant to know how to do. But hell, if Brian Orser was allowed (and he was ancient), then Yuri Plisetsky could be allowed.

It was probably only a minute or so of dancing all told, just till the end of the song. It was more than enough. Everyone was staring.

Breathing hard, Yuri wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. His hair was coming loose around his face. He pulled off the elastic, knotted it back again in a messy bun.

One of the real skateboarders, a tall guy in Adidas with a shaved head, was standing there with his arms crossed. "You a dancer or something?"

 _Oh God,_ thought Yuri, _this is the part where I get beaten into the ground by gopniks._

"Sort of," he said, shrugging like he really didn't give a fuck. 

He'd gone soft in St. Petersburg, forgotten that in the real world people didn't solve their differences with dance-offs or by throwing down quads. The worst Victor had ever done to him was to grab him by the face once, and to be fair that was after he'd kicked Victor in the back and called his fiance a pig and his ring garbage, so he had probably deserved it.

Ilya's expression had moved rapidly from pride to an panicky look of _oh shit I'm not with him_.

Yuri looked around quickly, checking that there was a clear line to the gates and that his phone was in his pocket and not in the hoodie that he'd thrown onto the ground. One advantage of all that conditioning was that he could probably run faster than this guy too. Probably.

"Ballsy little punk," the guy said. "Now get out of our park. Fuck off back to the ballet studio."

***

After that they decided it was time to cut their losses and go to Burger King. It was air conditioned and the odds of getting beaten up there were very low.

"Did you see the way those girls at the skate park were looking at you?" Ilya was crowing. "You could have got some right there."

Yuri shrugged and stuffed more fries into his mouth. All that skateboarding had made him hungry.

"Oh, I forget. You probably get it all over the world. Bored of Russian girls by now." He started singing under his breath in English. " _Ukraine girls really knock me out..._ "

Yuri shrugged again.

"No?" A disbelieving pause. "Like, never?"

"I mean, my coach is really strict and if you're competing..." That just sounded lame. "I've just got more important things to think about."

To distract himself from the aching social humiliation of still being a virgin at sixteen, Yuri sucked furiously on the straw of his Coke, only to be rewarded with the loud slurp of hitting bottom. Said it all, really. 

His mother had been seventeen when he was born. Yuuko had the triplets at eighteen. Clearly everyone was getting some but him.

"Also, you know... boys," he mumbled. "Actually."

"Ah right," said Ilya. "Boys then. You should. Probably that gopnik wanted some too."

Yuri snorted with laughter.

"The fuck are you anyway, a matchmaker? I'm going to get another Coke."

Standing in line to pay, he wondered whether or not Victor Nikiforov had been a virgin at sixteen. His Junior Grand Prix skate had hardly screamed _Eros_ , whatever Victor might think; it was Katsuki who'd made the costume mindblowingly hot.

But never mind Katsuki. Whether it had showed in his routines or not, he was sure Victor had lost his virginity before moving into seniors. Victor would have been determined to do everything earlier, faster, _better_ than everyone else. Like with skating, whether you enjoyed it wasn't even the point. How could he have let Victor get ahead of him again?

"It's like you think you're a ninja or something," said Ilya when he sat down again, picking up the thread of the interrupted conversation.

Yuri remembered standing under a waterfall with Katsuki, feeling the water battering against his back. He'd been trembling with the impact of it; Katsuki had stood like a stone.  "Something like that," he said.

That was when his phone started blowing up with notifications. Because of course someone in the park had been filming and of course they'd put it up on YouTube already. Not even Instagram; it was too long for Instagram.

Fuck. Yuri thumbed the video and then quickly swiped away again. He didn't want to see it. He didn't need to see it; he was getting fucking line-by-line commentary from the whole internet.

 _Only our Yura could get into a dance battle with skateboarders_ , said Mila on Whatsapp. 

_While sober_

_It was 11am, I guess you were sober??_

"Shit," said Yuri. "Shit shit shit."

 _shut up hag,_ he typed as quickly as possible. Then he turned off the phone. 

"What?" 

"Someone was filming at the skate park. They put it online already."

Ilya looked quizzical. "There's always stuff about you online. That whole 'Hero of Kazakhstan' thing..."

"He was just helping me get away from some fans!" said Yuri, a little too emphatically. "Whatever, I didn't want them filming _that_ either, but this is worse. I made myself look like a total muppet."

"I guess that's what it's like being famous."

Ilya didn't understand. Of course. 

"Yeah," said Yuri wearily, "that's what it's like being famous."

 _Victor would understand_ , he thought, before pushing the idea away. Plenty of people understood. Mila had lots of creepy fans. Otabek was Kazakhstan's hero. Katsuki... well, Katsuki needed to grasp the fact that he had fans in the first place, but he _ought_ to understand. So there was no need to go thinking about Victor.

 _Victor,_ thought Yuri, _will be laughing his fucking ass off when he sees this._

"Hey, I wanted to ask you something," said Ilya. "You know Mila Babicheva, don't you? She's really hot. Do you think you could introduce me?"

Yuri let his head fall forward onto the table.

***

In the smelly, crowded minibus on the way back to his grandad's, Yuri quickly messaged Otabek: _Do you think losing your virginity makes you a better skater?_

The reply didn't come until hours later, when Yuri was lying awake in bed.

_I wish!_

It sounded like Otabek had tested the theory already and found it wanting. Knowing that didn't make Yuri feel any better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "That 'Martini' song" is [обливай меня мартини](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtjH6zGbIEQ) by Нервы 
> 
> Personally I think that ice skaters always look a little uncoordinated, in an endearing way, when they try to dance off the ice. (For example, [Lambiel backstage at an ice show](https://www.instagram.com/p/BOJP5WNgLHD/).) But I'm sure Yuri did a great job.


	5. Chapter 5

**September 2016**

One wedding naturally wasn't enough for Victor Vasilievich Nikiforov. He needed three.

In the summer there had been the 'intimate family wedding' in Hasetsu. Yuri hadn't gone to that one, because he couldn't afford to fly around the world on whims that were unrelated to his skating career. Besides, he wasn't certain how he felt about being invited as a part of Victor's 'family.'

Inexplicably, some of the Yuri's Angels liked to call him 'Victor's son.' Back when he had been young and stupid – a couple of years ago, to be fair – he'd briefly wondered, with creeping horror, whether they knew something he didn't. But even the most cursory calculation showed that Victor would have to have been twelve when he was conceived, which was unbelievable even for Victor and would have taken his mother's shitty taste in men to new extremes.

No, his relationship with Victor was fucked up for reasons other than paternity, which was oddly reassuring. 

***

Unfortunately, nothing could save him from the invitations to the second and third weddings in St Petersburg in September, both the church wedding and the civil ceremony. Nor the planning beforehand.

Victor spent uncountable hours of off-ice training going on and on about it. While stretching. On the elliptical. While lifting weights. Somehow he even managed to add observations in between sit-ups. All of this made Yuri want to scream. Gym training was boring and painful enough without having to listen to Victor sharing his thoughts on every single fucking church in Piter.

Kazan Cathedral? Big, central, grand, excellent location on Nevsky Prospect, appropriately prestigious choice. Also (so said Victor) dark, unforgivably ugly, and completely the wrong aesthetic for the figure skating wedding of the century.

"If I wanted to get married at St Peter's in Rome then I would just go to Rome, wouldn't I?"

"I'm sure you would," said Yuri, taking a break from skipping rope to take a swig of water.

Maybe the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, then? It was in a lovely spot on the bank of the Neva on Vasilievsky Island; there was something almost Venetian about it. Victor loved the shining gilt of the domes; the frescos were fantastic. On top of that, he adored the idea of getting married in the birthplace of the St Petersburg school of ice skating, where the city had had its first artificial rink, and where Yakov had trained back in the 60s. But it was a monastery nowadays and in the end they were apparently too fussy about the fact that Katsuki wasn't actually Christian.

(Yuri felt immense satisfaction at the idea that _someone_ knew how to say no to Victor.)

Or the Cathedral of St. Andrew the First-Called? Victor lived in the diocese, didn't he? He wasn't sure, but he thought he did. Anyway, he loved sitting and gazing at it while he had coffee at Marketplace across the street. He loved how pink it was, it was adorable – but it was just too small.

"This is meant to be the big wedding! I can't disappoint people! I have to be able to fit everyone in."

"You can leave me off the list," Yuri offered, but Victor just laughed at him.

Usually at this point Victor embarked on an extended monologue about how _tragic_ it was that they couldn't get married in the Church on the Spilled Blood. It was central, it was big enough, it was glorious inside and out, a fantastic, hallucinatory mix of Byzantine and _fin de siècle_. (Just gaudy enough for Victor, thought Yuri.)

"I always feel like the angels belong in an Art Nouveau poster advertising soap!" said Victor, apparently under the delusion that this was a good thing. "And the colors!"

The Church on the Spilled Blood had been closed by the Soviets in 1932 or something, and it had never been reconsecrated. It was a museum now; if you liked Chinese tourists taking selfies, it was your place. Not to mention that it was a memorial church, which meant that they had never, ever let people get married there, not even before the revolution.

"Why don't you give up on the wedding and just have a _panikhida_ to the eternal memory of Alexander II instead?" asked Yuri, rolling his eyes.

Personally he thought that the _Narodnaya Volya_ had been pretty badass. They were like the punks and anarchists of the late nineteenth century. It was one part of his history lessons that he'd actually enjoyed – as he'd told his tutor, he thought the Tsar had had it coming to him. (His tutor had been immensely gratified at the sudden flicker of interest; it hadn't lasted.)

In the end, after all that fuss, Victor chose the Prince St. Vladimir's Cathedral, the one that was literally just across the road from their rink. He claimed that he always stopped in to light a candle there before practice. A likely story, thought Yuri. He suspected that the closest Victor had ever got to being a churchgoer was being blessed by the Patriarch before every Olympics. 

"Do they have a special VIP section or something?" said Yuri. " _I've_ never seen you in there."

Victor just looked amused. "Is that so, O Defender of Orthodoxy?"

"Fuck you."

"I'll have you know that the Bishop was very welcoming."

Yuri wondered exactly how much you had to donate to get the bishop to agree that you were a regular. It probably made no difference to Victor. As he went on to tell Yuri, he'd sold the exclusive photographic rights for the wedding to _OK! Magazine_.

"It'll keep the rest of the paparazzi away! And it covers most of the... well, no, not _most_ of the cost, but it'll certainly help."

"Christ, Victor, try to remember you're not actually an oligarch. You'd better not have Lady Gaga performing at the reception."

Victor's face fell a little. "No, there's no way I could afford her. I'm not _that_ rich."

"Ha! How much did you charge for that oligarch wedding that _you_ did?"

That abomination had easily won the prize for most tasteless wedding of the century. Together in the canteen, Mila and Yuri had pored over the pages of _OK!_ , which they'd bought as a joint investment in mocking Victor mercilessly. They'd soon discovered that Victor had been the least mockable part of the festivities. This was saying something because he'd been dressed in a toga as the Roman God of Love while skating around a rink full of ice sculptures that were doubling as champagne fountains. Or something. It had been difficult to make out all the fine detail underneath all the roses and gold leaf. 

In wide-eyed horror they'd moved onto stalking the bride's Instagram. It had probably been a mistake. Mila, who could be driven to cry with laughter even by normal things, had ended up rolling around on the floor in literal hysterics until Yuri had actually dumped ice water on her to get her to shut up.

"Too damn little," said Victor, who almost never swore. "I thought it was going to be fun, like Eurovision. But it wasn't."

"So you're not going to have a..."

Victor put his hand over Yuri's mouth.

 _Live tiger,_ Yuri tried to say, because that was the one part of the oligarch wedding that had been really super awesomely cool. He would actually have paid to go to Victor's wedding if it included a live tiger. But clearly no joy. From beneath Victor's hand, his question came out as an incomprehensible mumble.

"The Katsuki-Nikiforov wedding," said Victor firmly, "will be tasteful. I promised Yuuri it would."

Clearly it all depended on your definition of tasteful. Victor was having pure gold wedding crowns commissioned from some famous goldsmith in Nizhni Novgorod. Not, he hastened to add, because he thought that the cathedral's own wedding crowns were inadequate, but because he wanted to be able to keep and display them afterwards.

"Yuuri and I are going to get a cabinet for our gold medals," he explained in the middle of a split, "and then have the crowns on the shelf at the top."

In a weird way it made sense: Victor thought of his wedding as a symbol of victory, just like everything else he ever did.

"And it's... ouch," added Victor, going into a backbend in his split and then apparently thinking better of it. "I'd better hold this just a little longer."

It was one of the reasons Yuri enjoyed doing cool-down stretches with Victor, despite it all. Yuri's own flexibility might still be deteriorating by the day, as his growth continued and he started to put on muscle, but at least here – unlike on the ice – he could still lord it over Victor. It wasn't just that Victor was grown up; it was that he was twenty-eight, nearly twenty-nine. By figure skating standards, he wasn't just old. He was _ancient_.

Everything was harder for him. He took longer to warm up in the morning, always messing around with kinesio tape and knee braces. He had all sort of little twinges and strains, perpetually favoring one side or the other, stopping in the middle of a flawless runthrough to wince and crack a shoulderblade. Katsuki joked – only half in fun – that Victor spent more time alone with the physio than with him. Yuri couldn't even keep track of whatever minor injury Victor was coddling at the moment. He suspected Victor of half putting it on, turning the little aches that every figure skater suffered into an excuse to play for attention and sympathy. Yuri had precisely zero sympathy. If Victor had done the decent thing and retired, he could be sitting in a jacuzzi somewhere right now, indulging in the painkiller of his choice – whether ISU-sanctioned, legal, or otherwise.

Instead, Victor was using his extended front split as an excuse to show Yuri endless photos of wedding crowns on his phone.

"Yeah, I get the idea already," said Yuri. He propped his ankle up on a big foam roller to manage a small oversplit. "Cool, whatever."

"And it's a good thing we're getting them made," Victor concluded, "because apparently I have a really small head! It's embarassing! Anyway, I was going to ask you..."

"Don't ask me! I don't actually give a fuck about wedding crowns. Get whichever one you want."

Victor pouted. "But that wasn't what I was going to ask you about." He took a deep breath and leaned a little more deeply into his split, staring fixedly at his own foot. "Yuuri and I want you to be a witness at the cathedral wedding."

"Well, fuck," said Yuri. "Can I say no?"

"Do you want to say no?"

"I think you should ask Yakov. Or Chris! Anyway, aren't I too young?"

Victor sighed deeply, but it turned out that was only because he was disentangling himself from his split. He sat with his feet pressed sole-to-sole, systematically wiggling his taped and battered toes. "Yakov doesn't do churches; he's going to be a witness at ZAGS. Chris is Catholic. And you're sixteen, so you're old enough. I checked!"

Probably the Bishop had checked for him.

"I'm literally like the worst person you could possibly choose to do this. The witness has to do all sorts of responsible stuff, like keeping track of the rings and swapping crowns... I don't do weddings. I'd probably fuck it up somehow, and..."

 _And anyway I hate you._ The words wouldn't come out, possibly because he really didn't believe in them.

Victor smiled a gentle, encouraging, infuriatingly condescending smile. "I have faith in you, Yura. It's only choreography. And of course I don't expect perfection! No one is more forgetful than me, after all."

Damn Victor. Yuri had played right into the hands of a man who'd raised manipulation to a high art form. In a few sentences he'd managed to turn this into a matter of honor. It was a challenge that couldn't possibly be turned down.

"All right!" said Yuri. "I'll be the witness at your stupid wedding. But you'd better not ask me to do too much. I have to get ready for Rostelecom."

"Don't worry," said Victor. "That makes two of us."

***

It was a beautiful September morning, brilliantly sunny and clear, with the wind gusting off the Baltic Sea. All of this Yuri could tell from bed with the curtain still pulled, so there was really no point in getting up. 

He lay there for a little while lamenting a rest day cut untimely short. It was 8am and Lilia and Yakov were already awake, running around getting ready for the wedding. Yuri could hear Lilia telling Yakov off about something, followed by his grumbling, reluctant remonstrance. It was always nice to remember that he wasn't the only one who got told off by Lilia, although somehow Yuri got the sense that Yakov actually half enjoyed it. They were so weird, those two.

Just as he was about to roll over and bury his face back into the pillow, the door of his room opened. Lilia came marching in and threw the curtains open. He took evasive action too late; a sheet of sunlight fell across his face. He blinked and threw his forearm across his eyes.

"Yuri Plisetsky, I told you last night that you would have to set your alarm! You need to be out of the shower in fifteen minutes if you expect me to do your hair for you."

If you were going to be a figure skater, there was no point wasting time complaining about early mornings. Yuri dragged himself out of bed and into the shower.

An hour later, wearing his suit and tie, hair still slightly damp but elaborately braided, he was sitting in the limousine with Yakov and Lilia, hurriedly eating an energy bar in lieu of breakfast. Even as they drove over the Tuchkov Bridge, you could already see the crowds. People were walking across the bridge in their suits and dresses; the parking lot of the ice rink was packed, cars jammed at an angle into the smallest of spaces; cars lined the avenue and the side road outside the cathedral, pulled up half onto the grass and the sidewalks.

Outside the cathedral, a bank of photographers waited to capture them as they climbed out of the car. Yuri's tie blew in the wind as he got out; the flashes going off seemed dim compared to the bright sun. Next to him, Mila was fussing with her unfamiliar headscarf, which fluttered wildly as she tried to pull it on. 

"I look like an idiot, don't I?" she said, putting one hand to the Chanel scarf which (apparently) Victor had bought her at Au Pont Rouge to apologise for her having to wear one in the first place.

"Yeah." Yuri paused for maximum effect. "But I don't think it's the scarf."

Mila hit him; he would have been disappointed if she hadn't. Then she laughed and they went in together.

***

It was strange standing with Victor and Katsuki and Mila in front of the throngs of people that filled the Prince St Vladimir Cathedral. Yuri was used to crowds: they cheered, they applauded, they screamed your name. Naturally the congregation at a wedding did none of those things. They only stood and solemnly watched, crossing themselves at intervals.

As the service rolled inexorably onwards, Yuri found himself scanning the faces in the crowd. Who knew Victor had so many friends? Only really not all of them were friends. There were all of the physios and nutritionists and doctors and trainers. There were the cleaning ladies and other assorted _babushkas_ from the rink, all of whom seemed to adore Victor unquestioningly. There was Tamara Trusova, all the way from Moscow with a good number of her stable of skaters, all of them gazing at Victor and Katsuki like they were still trying to size up the competition. There were a lot of people from the ISU and the Figure Skating Federation of Russia (notwithstanding that a lot of them couldn't stand Victor). Even RUSADA had sent a delegation; Yuri wondered whether Victor had actually invited them voluntarily, or under duress from Yakov, or whether they'd just assumed they were invited. Personally he couldn't look at anyone from RUSADA without wanting to piss in their direction. It was a Pavlovian thing.

A rumour had gone around that the President of Russia was going to be at the wedding. Thankfully it had turned out not to be true. ("You don't need to invite a person as important that," said Victor. "Someone would just tell you they were coming and what security arrangements you needed to make.") The Minister of Sport was there, though, and on the steps outside before the wedding, Yakov had introduced Yuri to one of the Vice-Governors of Saint Petersburg, the head of the Committee for Culture. Dutifully shaking hands, they had cast one another almost conspiratorial glances: _we don't really give a damn about each other, do we?_ Yuri had felt almost warm towards this random old bureaucrat, who was probably only there because of Lilia or something. Even Victor's first coach was there, because apparently having taught a four-year-old Victor Nikiforov forwards and backwards swizzles out on Krestovsky Island was distinction enough.

There was a small gaggle of minor oligarchs in expensive suits and vertiginous heels, the sort of people you didn't want to admit to recognising because ultimately they were famous for nothing whatsoever. The only reason Yuri had a clue who they were was because they'd always featured in the articles about Victor's doings in the pre-Katsuki era: _Victor Nikiforov was seen out clubbing Saturday night with the son of..._

(Not that Yuri wanted to admit to having read gossip blogs about Victor either, but who could blame him? He'd been thirteen or fourteen, suddenly curious about what his rinkmate did when he wasn't skating. It hadn't been edifying reading.)

Towards the front of the cathedral there was a small cluster of silver heads, that hair unmistakable even peeping out from underneath headscarves. Victor's family, presumably, not that Yuri had ever met any of them. Yuri couldn't exactly blame him; he wouldn't have been that keen to introduce most of his cousins either.

In the midst of the congregation, Yuri could spot the faces of a few real friends. Chris had come from Switzerland with Matthieu and his coach. Celestino Cialdini was there from America with Phichit Chulanont. But there was no Otabek, because apparently he was too busy focusing on his training. 

(Yuri hadn't asked. He hadn't asked. Otabek had told him; so, annoyingly, had Victor, who had extended the invitation seemingly on the strength of sharing a podium with him once. Yuri wasn't disappointed in Otabek, of course he wasn't. He would have made exactly the same decision himself. Naturally.)

After a while even the familiar faces blurred together, and Yuri lost himself in the liturgy. Ripples of heat burned upwards from the ranks of candles. Incense drifted slowly upwards into the dome, twisting upon itself with the movement of the air currents as priests swung censers with the faint jingling of bells. The bishop chanted out the prayers in a _basso profundo_ ; the choir soared.

It wasn't as if Yuri _believed_ in any of it: most of religion was so much bullshit. Back in Moscow, his mother had dragged him to church all the time, but if God existed He certainly hadn't given a damn about any of her prayers. Despite all of that Yuri still liked the feeling he got when he was in church. It was like watching Lilia dance, or seeing someone land a perfect quad lutz – a sense of something mighty and ineffable and indescribably far beyond him. 

Or maybe he just felt that way because he didn't have a quad lutz yet. Probably all the priests and deacons were sitting behind the _iconostasis_ bitching about how the bishop had caved and let this damn figure skater turn the cathedral into a backdrop for his dream wedding. Nothing was holy if you looked at it closely enough.

Still, being an athlete was enough to turn anyone superstitious; you had to take your help where you could find it. Yuri bent his head and prayed. Really it was more of an incantation. _He won't get to the Olympics, he won't get to the Olympics, he won't get to the Olympics._ It fell into rhythm with the chanting of the Bishop. _Gospodi pomilui, gospodi pomilui, gospodi pomilui. Lord have mercy._

Yuri cast a sidelong glance at Victor. He was gazing slightly upwards into the middle distance, a beatific smile playing about his lips. A few flyaway strands of his silver hair were lit by a beam of sunlight from an upper window. He held a candle in front of him. From the balcony came the clicking of cameras. Victor probably knew exactly how he looked, exactly what he was doing – the English choirboy act. As if. 

Finally they got to the crowning. Victor kissed the crown as sweetly as if he'd been kissing Katsuki's gold medal, then bent his head to the Bishop as graciously as if he'd been standing on the podium. He'd had a lifetime of practice after all. Katsuki nervously dipped his head, but he had a steely look in his eyes, as if he were saying a final _fuck you_ to everyone else on the planet who'd dreamt of marrying Victor. As far as Katsuki was concerned, no doubt they could all just cry into their pillows tonight. He'd be screaming into his – or, more likely, Victor would.

 _Damn_. You weren't meant to think about things like that in church. Not that he wanted to think about it anywhere. _Brain bleach,_ he thought hurriedly. _Brain bleach._

Besides, the crowning was his big moment. No way was he going to miss his cue. Yuri stepped up behind Victor and Katsuki and laid his hands on the solid gold wedding crowns from Nizhni Novgorod. They were circlets of hammered gold leaves, like gilt olive wreaths. You had to hand it to Victor, they were beautiful. Yuri held his breath, reached up – not nearly as far up as he once would have done – and exchanged the crowns three times between the dark head and the silver.

 _This is it_ , he thought. _They're really married now._ Not that he had expected anything else to happen, but was still strange to think.

After the Gospel reading and the common cup, it was time for them to walk around the wedding altar three times. For a couple of weeks now, Victor had been insisting on practices in the entrance hall of the rink, with Georgi willingly playing the altar and humming the tune. Victor had, he said, seen so many weddings where the couple were hesitant, or out of step, or dragging the witness along like so much baggage. (Which weddings did he get invited to anyway, wondered Yuri?). He was determined that they should walk in exact unison with the hymn – and so they did, Yuri following a step behind with a hand resting lightly at the back of each crown. As perfect, and as peculiar, as a trio in an ice show.

Then it was just the benediction, and Yuri could breath a sigh of relief. It was done. They were married. And he hadn't messed anything up.

***

Only one picture of Yuri from the wedding ended up in _OK! Magazine_ : himself crowning Victor and Katsuki in the middle of the ceremony.

One of the big figure skating gossip blogs picked it up, cropped out Katsuki, and added the inevitable caption: 

_The new king is dead, long live the old king._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although you might argue that it's sort of tangential, I couldn't resist doing a wedding chapter, because it would happen now and because Yuri would be involved. If you want to read more about Victor and Yuuri's decision to have a church wedding, that's covered in my fic [Crowned in Glory](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9992924).
> 
> There's a good summary of what happens in an Eastern Orthodox wedding [here](http://web.mit.edu/manoli/www/wedding/ceremony.html).
> 
> If you're looking for interior pictures of the Prince St Vladimir Cathedral, as I was, you'll do far better searching under its Russian name: Князь-Владимирский Собор
> 
> Finally, next chapter we'll be back to the competitive season, and the shit will really start to hit the fan...


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is only the first half of what was meant to be a single chapter. Send help. 
> 
> (I'll post the second half within a few days.)

**Autumn 2016**

It was Yuri's Swan Lake season: the White Swan for his short program and the Black Swan for his free skate. 

"Your Ugly Duckling season!" said Victor with a laugh whenever the subject came up. It was meant to be a joke; Yuri didn't find it at all funny. Admitting that it hurt would have shown weakness, so he just muttered something about "your mutton-dressed-as-lamb season" and turned away before Victor could see that he was actually upset.

Skating Odette as well as Odile hadn't been his plan, but Lilia had insisted that the program would be 'unbalanced' otherwise. It was so much bullshit – and even if it wasn't, hadn't he just spent a whole season skating Agape without Eros? He was long overdue for a change from innocence. So he thought, anyway; Lilia apparently disagreed, and if he wanted her choreography, which he did, there wasn't much he could do about it.

Whatever. All swans were vicious fuckers anyway; anyone who said otherwise didn't know swans. They were big – a consolation given that he was now, shockingly, starting to find himself eye-to-eye with Katsuki – and they could break a human arm with one flap of a wing. That concept was his inspiration for both programs.

He kept trying to hammer the idea home with Lilia in the studio. "You know that swans can..."

"...break your arm with their wing," said Lilia, folding her own arms. "Yes, yes. I doubt it. Remember that their bones are hollow. You must make yourself hollow too before you can fly."

More priceless pearls of wisdom from the Mariinsky. It was probably what Petipa had said to her teacher's teacher or something. You had to be in the right mood for it. Yuri wasn't. At all.

Lilia demonstrated the beating of wings, her arms so fluid that you could hardly imagine there were bones inside of them at all. It was the grace of movement that had made her the Bolshoi's _prima ballerina assoluta_ , the greatest dancer in her generation. Perhaps one of the greatest dancers of the twentieth century.

"Like that," she said simply. "Again, please."

 _Like that – as if._ Yuri couldn't take it any longer. 

"I can't do it like that! I'm never going to be able to do it like that! Maybe if I practiced for five years I'd get an extra two points on my PCS or something – and it still wouldn't make any fucking difference, because I'm a figure skater, and I have to land fucking quads! Quads! I'm not a ballerina, Lilia Mikhailovna! I never will be! There's no point! Why don't you just give the hell up now?"

Lilia studied him in silence. She didn't need to say anything. 

Yuri covered his face with his hand, chest heaving, trying to get hold of himself. This was humiliating. Victor might let him get away with behaving like a little shit, and even Yakov sometimes let the odd outburst slide, but this was Lilia. He couldn't act like this with Lilia; she would crucify him, and deservedly so.

What a loser he was. Not just on the rink. Everywhere.

"I'm sorry, Lilia Mikhailovna," he ventured finally from behind his hand.

"You understand that this behavior is not acceptable," said Lilia, a flat statement.

"Yes, Lilia Mikhailovna."

Part of him wished that she would just throw him out of her studio for good, end the charade. Throw him out of her apartment, give up on him completely. It would be no more than he deserved.

"You will never speak like this to me again."

"No, Lilia Mikhailovna."

"I am a ballerina; this is what I teach, whether or not you consider it valuable. I don't see any point in continuing the lesson now. Take some time to calm down and consider your behavior. We'll discuss this later."

"Fine," said Yuri, more sharply than he'd intended, turning aside before tears began to prick at his eyes. He grabbed his things and left the studio hurriedly. 

***

It was cold outside in mid-October, near freezing, with the early evening beginning to fade into a royal blue twilight. He could feel the sweat already chilling on his skin, and pulled hard on the drawstring of his hoodie, trying to keep out the draughts.

He crossed the main road almost without looking where he was going, prompting a symphony of honking out of the evening traffic. He threw them the finger, probably invisible in the gloom, and picked his way through the haphazardly stopped cars.

Once he got across the road, a safe distance from the studio, he caught hold of himself, realising that he had no idea where he was heading. Lacking anything better to do, he went and threw himself down on one of the benches by the canal. Headlights swept past on the main road at the corner, but the canal itself was as quiet as the grave. Inky water lapped at the banks, agitated by the passage of a boat a long way past.

 _I could just throw myself in,_ he thought vindictively. _Then they'd be sorry._

But the idea had no appeal whatsoever when he came down to it. He sat huddled in his hoodie, hands stuffed into his pockets, letting the spreading cold numb his mind and his body alike.

It must have been ten or fifteen minutes later when some guy came walking along the canal. At first Yuri thought he must be a dog walker, but there was no dog. He was smoking a cigarette; you could see the bobbing of the lit end, a tiny coal in the darkness. 

When he got to the bench he lingered for a moment by the railing, casting a glance over his shoulder at Yuri: "You looking for something?"

"No," said Yuri, not bothering to look up. "Fuck off."

Thankfully the guy actually did fuck off; Yuri's efforts to develop a manner combining boredom and aggressiveness in exactly the right proportions had obviously paid off. He wondered whether the guy had been trying to sell him drugs or to pick him up. People had tried both on him before. 

After the guy had gone, Yuri wished he'd said something different.

Failing a drugs test. That would show everyone exactly what a screw-up he really was, give them an excuse to wash their hands of him forever. Maybe he could go to a fitness store and buy some dodgy supplements. No trouble at all to get a positive for ephedrine or steroids or something, only he had a feeling that RUSADA would sweep it all under the carpet. Better to get busted for heroin or cocaine. Unlike Victor's oligarch friends, he'd have no way out of that. Mug shots, police record, news stories across the world. _A boy like that, no surprise he's turned out just like his mother. Even though they gave him every opportunity._

Yuri had started to shiver violently. He couldn't sit on the bench forever; if he was going to score some drugs, it wasn't going to happen here. He got up and started towards Sennaya Square, a much more likely prospect.

To get there he had to pass St. Nicholas Cathedral, its pale blue facade lit up by the floodlights, its golden domes glowing. Raucous bells were chiming out the start of the 6pm liturgy. It looked... warm, if nothing else. It was a long walk to Sennaya Square and he didn't fancy taking one of the overcrowded trams. There was no harm in going in for a little while, just to warm up.

There was a woman begging at the back gate, as always. He threw her a few coins and avoided looking at her face. He knew perfectly well that his mother was now living in a scummy apartment somewhere in Voronezh, but he could never help thinking _that could be her_ and _oh God, I don't want to know, I don't want to know._

Inside, the church was shockingly hot and close. The lower level, with its low, arched ceilings, was packed with people circulating from chapel to chapel and icon to icon, lighting their candles. You could believe that the heat was rippling upwards from all the open flames.

Yuri gave the _babushka_ some money and took a handful of candles himself.

 _Lord have mercy,_ he thought, crossing himself in front of an icon of the Virgin Mary and lighting a candle. _I don't know why I'm doing this, it's such bullshit and you don't really exist, but Lord, have mercy anyway._

He stayed until the end of the liturgy – until his legs, which he hadn't stretched and cooled down properly after his lesson in the studio, were beginning to ache from standing. He lingered while the priest tidied up afterwards, blowing out the burnt-down candles (scarcely more than lumps of beeswax drips) and tossing them into the baskets on the floor. 

Yuri left it just too long. He was starting to become conspicuous, one of the few people still in the church. Finally the priest actually looked at him. He was not that old, with a straggly beard and his sandy hair pulled back into a short ponytail.

"Young man," he said kindly, "did you want to talk? Confession was before the liturgy, but if you..."

Yuri shook his head. "No! No thanks. I just came in and I... no, I mean, I've got to go now."

Because _I just came in to get out of the cold_ sounded pathetic. He fled unceremoniously, without even kissing the guy's hand or anything. Probably the priest thought... he didn't know what the priest thought. But whatever it was, it was wrong.

Yuri strode along Sadovaya Street as fast as he could, leaning into the whipping wind, his cheeks burning with shame. How did he get himself into these messes? He was just the sort of moron who'd decide to go and buy drugs and end up having to escape from confession in a cathedral instead. Like he could have gone to the priest and said _I just swore at and disrespected my ballet teacher._ In ballet it was accounted one of the gravest of sins, but the guy probably would have laughed him out of the church. Yuri was so lame that he couldn't even sin properly.

By the time he got to Sennaya Square, his stomach was rumbling painfully. He wasn't used to eating late. Yakov and Lilia made sure that he ate dinner at the same time every night, exactly what was listed in his training plan. It was grilled lamb, zucchini and buckwheat tonight, he was sure of it. His stomach rumbled even louder. It was one of his favorites.

He ended up in some little hole-in-the-wall kebab shop, eating a greasy lukewarm kebab that he wasn't even sure _was_ lamb, and drinking a tarragon soda that, straight out of the refrigerator case, just made him chilly all over again. He ought to have been enjoying his getaway from the rigors of training. This was ridiculous.

He lingered there as long as he could, browsing the news on his phone – nothing about a runaway teenage figure skater yet – and watching the people coming in and out. Finally the staff got sick of having him taking up a whole table and started ostentatiously cleaning around him.

Standing outside on the corner only seemed like a good idea for about two minutes. Early snowflakes were drifting down out of the sky. He thought about going to a movie but he didn't have that much cash left, and spending a night on the street didn't seem like it would be much fun. Defeated, he trudged back towards Lilia's place. It wasn't even that late, not quite 10pm. At least it was past his bedtime.

Yuri paused at the door to the apartment, dreading what was about to happen. He was about to find out exactly how long Yakov could shout without needing to breathe, exactly how long Lilia could give him the icy, silent treatment. Then he squared his shoulders, turned the key and let himself in.

Yakov and Lilia were sitting together on the couch. Classical music was playing on the radio. Just an ordinary evening in the Baranovskaya household. Probably they were glad to be rid of him and to get the chance for a little peace and quiet.

Except that they both jumped to their feet as soon as he came through the door. Lilia didn't say anything – she came to him and, with a little indrawn breath, put both her arms around him. Yuri wanted to ask her forgiveness but he couldn't get the words out. Instead he just hugged her back, hoping that she would know what he was thinking. She was so tiny, really tiny, why had he never noticed that before? In the background, Yakov was saying "you should have realised how worried we'd be," mumbling like he felt obligated to deliver some sort of rebuke but was embarrassed about it.

"Yuratchka," said Lilia, and that was all.

 _Oh God,_ thought Yuri, _it's like I'm the prodigal son or something._

***

Both Yuri and Victor were going to Rostelecom, the first Grand Prix competition of the season. Yuri wasn't certain whether it was a great thing – a chance to slay the dragon early on – or the worst thing ever.

It was a thin field for this season's Grand Prix series. With Victor's return to competition at the end of last season, both Chris and Georgi had seen the writing on the wall and retired. Both a year younger than Victor, they had spent their whole careers in his shadow, and Yuri supposed it had now become clear to both of them that trying to outwait him was a fool's errand.

Yuri could afford to outwait him, he supposed, but he didn't want to. He wanted to defeat Victor now, make it clear that he wasn't just Victor's successor – he was the improved article. Rostelecom wasn't exactly a big enough stage to make that statement, but it was a start.

The White Swan left him still with a chance. Victor was in first after the short program, but he'd had a couple of uncharacteristically shaky landings, and Yuri was only four points behind him. Another two points behind Yuri was Paul-Henri Leroy, J.J's seventeen-year-old little brother, but Yuri wasn't worried about that. He refused to acknowledge that Paul-Henri was even a person. One Leroy was enough; two Leroys had to be some sort of weird cloning experiment gone awry.

So Yuri was feeling OK when he got back to the hotel after his short program, even if he would rather have been in first. He took a shower (he hated showering at the rink), pulled on the pretty decent hotel bathrobe, and settled down with his laptop to watch the English-language Eurosport commentary on his program, courtesy of an only sort-of-illegal VPN that Mila had helped him set up.

"His music is _Swan Lake_ ," said the male commentator, "the choreography by Lilia Baranovskaya... an old warhorse, that one." 

Yuri wasn't sure whether they meant Lilia or the piece. Damn his shitty English; just another way he wasn't good enough yet.

"This short programme has some really old-school Russian choreography," said the woman. "Always classical, always elegant, but perhaps looking a bit dated now in 2016."

Fucking lot of nerve, thought Yuri. Was anyone lining up to ask her to choreograph a piece for the Royal Ballet? He didn't think so.

"And a very safe choice of music by Yuri Plisetsky too, wouldn't you say, Megan? There are about three Russian girls skating _Swan Lake_ this year. So I suppose he's got his gender going for him, but still..."

And had either of them said anything two years ago when Victor had chosen to skate to _Stammi Vicino_ , which was probably the most famous opera aria of all time? He sincerely doubted it.

"Yes, John, this is a surprise coming from him. After that rather shocking exhibition program last year, I expected he'd bring us something with more..."

"Electric guitar?"

"Exactly."

Fuck them. What the fuck did they know about art? If something had been danced and skated incessantly for the past hundred and fifty years, that was a sign that it was, you know, actually _good_.

Clearly they had no idea what 'classic' meant. Clearly they also had no taste, because they'd just fallen all over themselves to praise Victor's new short program – _modern! innovative!_ – which was choreographed by that hack Wayne McGregor and involved him skating to a White Stripes remix in a costume that looked awfully like a slip. As ever, Victor was a joke. At least he wasn't skating to Madonna this year.

"I expect," John was saying, "that this year's program is a tribute by Yuri Plisetsky to Lilia Baranovskaya, with whom he's been working since his senior debut. It was her signature role when she was a ballerina at the Bolshoi."

"Yes," said Megan. "It does give him more justification than most. Really I think it's sweet."

A tribute from one artist to another – _sweet_! 

Yuri shut the laptop in disgust without even watching the rest of his program. He knew how he'd skated. Now it was time for him to get some rest.

Victor had better watch out. In two days, at the free skate, Yuri was going to destroy him. Or at least he was going to try.

***

It happened in the last practice session before the free skate. 

Victor launched into a quad flip and bobbled the landing in a way that caught Yuri's attention even from the corner of his eye. A two-footed stumble, a lurch. He didn't bother to try to save it, to make it look graceful. He didn't keep on skating. Bent double, he just let the momentum carry him onwards.

Yuri skated up to him. Victor had half straightened, one hand held to his back.

"Lifted Katsudon too many times, huh?" said Yuri, thinking that he was putting it on for sympathy. Everyone landed badly sometimes. Most of them a lot more often than Victor did.

But then he bit his tongue. He regretted his words as soon as he saw Victor's face – dead white, drawn with pain. Victor was afraid. 

Victor let the momentum of his jump carry him over to the boards where Yakov was waiting. An angling of his skates was all it took. He didn't take a single stroke; he didn't look as if he could. Yakov leaned forward, put an arm out to Victor and gathered him close.

"I suppose something was bound to happen eventually," Yuri could hear Victor murmuring to Yakov, their heads bent together. "But why now? Why now?"

Yakov kissed him on the forehead, said something Yuri couldn't make out. And Victor Nikiforov, nearly thirty years old, five-time world champion, shook his head and buried his face against his coach's neck.

 _Oh God,_ thought Yuri. _It's his back. He's really hurt. He is._

The shock of the realisation seemed to fizz through him, a tingling from his lips down to the tips of his fingers. He could hear the pounding of the blood in his brain. Everything seemed very distant, the wrong end of the telescope.

Then the world spun back into motion around them. Medics came rushing over with a stretcher, crowded around Victor, helped him step gingerly off the ice. Now Yuri could see nothing of Victor but the top of his silver head; still wearing his skates, he was half a head taller than everyone else. The whole rink was staring, trying to overhear any fragments of conversation. How could anyone go on with their warm-ups while Victor Nikiforov was in limbo by the sidelines?

A few moments later, Paul-Henri Leroy stroked past Yuri, went into a three-turn and launched into a toe loop. ( _Popped,_ noted a distant part of Yuri's brain. _Good._ ) It seemed to break the spell. After that, the other skaters started to get back to their own routines, needing to fit in every last minute of practice before the free program. 

Yuri stood alone on the ice in the midst of it, not knowing what on earth he was meant to do – or to feel.

Yakov was waving at him. "Yura! Get back to practice! I'm going with Victor. Lilia will look after you."

 _Going where?_ he thought stupidly. _Oh. To the hospital._

He nodded mechanically and did what Yakov said. It was easier to do that, easier not to think. When he came out of a scratch spin a few moments later, he glanced over to the competitors' area, but Yakov and Victor had already gone as if they never had been there. He went through the rest of the practice session in a daze.

Afterwards, he and Lilia went out to the car together in silence. They got halfway back to the hotel without saying anything to each other, looking out the window at the snowflakes falling inexorably from a sky as grey as smoke. Then Lilia's phone pinged. She pulled it out from a pocket of her puffer jacket, glanced almost casually at it.

Yuri wondered how she could seem so uninterested. She had confiscated his own phone before practice started; she certainly wasn't giving it back now. Just thinking about what people must be saying online made him itch.

"Victor is withdrawing from the competition," she said finally. It must have been a text from Yakov at the hospital. "They think he's fractured a vertebra. They're taking him for scans now."

Even in the half-light of a Moscow late afternoon, Yuri could see Lilia frowning, a single line marring her smooth forehead. Then he realised she was worried about him.

"I guess this is a good chance for me," he said. "That's how I should think about it."

 _I bet Georgi and Chris are wishing they hadn't retired,_ he thought.

"Is that how you feel?" asked Lilia, perfectly neutrally.

"No," Yuri admitted.

"Yakov will be back in time for your skate tonight. You can go to visit Victor tomorrow morning, if you like."

"Yeah," said Yuri. "OK."

This was what he loved about Lilia. She didn't waste his time trying to make him talk about his feelings or go on for the sake of filling space. She told him how Victor was; she told him when the visiting hours were. That was everything he needed to know.

Lilia put an arm around his shoulder. In the Kiss and Cry it was always awkward because he knew people were watching; now it was awkward because he knew no one was watching. He leaned against her, his eyes shutting for a moment, feeling the comfort of her warmth even through her jacket. Then he let her take her arm away again. He was so grateful. He could never show it.

"Now," said Lilia, "you'll take a nap before the competition tonight."

So he would. And here they were at the hotel. He let her lead him in.

***

Yakov came bustling into the backstage area just as Yuri was finishing off his warmup with a few jumps.

"He's fine," he said, half to Yuri and half to Lilia, who was standing and watching his warmup with her arms folded. "Katsuki's with him now. Got on the first Sapsan from Piter as soon as he heard."

From his tone, it sounded more like he was saying _he's not dead yet_ , but Yuri knew that Yakov didn't want him to ask anything now. At least if Victor really wasn't fine, if he was busy having more scans or trying to beg morphine from the doctors, then there was a chance that he wasn't lying in his hospital bed watching the Rostelecom Cup live on Eurosport _right now_. Yuri clung to that possibility like a lifeline.

When he stepped out rinkside, into the familiar television lights and the familiar avalanche of cheers, Victor's absence struck him in a way that it hadn't before. _Victor's in the hospital. He might not compete for the rest of the season. He might never skate again._

It was weirdly disorienting. He couldn't hold the idea in his head. A moment after thinking, it would slide away again, and he would check himself, questioning whether it could really be true. It was like he'd fallen into the wrong time stream, moving further and further away from reality. He'd felt the same way when he'd woken up from this nap: those few seconds of forgetfulness, followed by the sudden disbelief.

And now here he was, skating last at Rostelecom because Victor no longer could. The big screen was showing shots of Victor's disappointed fans in the audience, one girl in a _Stammi Vicino_ costume actually sobbing snotty tears into a crumpled tissue. That sight ought to have brought him so much more joy than it actually did.

_Did I want this? Did I wish for this? Is it my fault?_

Of course he knew it wasn't his fault – if he could have broken people's spines just by hating them, an epidemic of paralysis would have swept Russia by now – but still, deep down, he felt responsible. He had wished, he had prayed – he had prayed at Victor's wedding, even – and then this had happened, the answer to all his prayers. God had struck Victor down at the height of his powers.

He didn't want it now. He would give it back if he could.

He imagined Victor unexpectedly turning up rinkside after his own skate – zipping off his team jacket to reveal his costume, pulling off his skate guards, ready to take the ice after all. _The hospital?_ he would say sunnily. _Oh, that was all a mistake, I'm fine now! You didn't think that I would actually pull out of Rostelecom, did you?_

In the moment it seemed only too likely, exactly the sort of shit that Victor would pull. Just thinking about it left Yuri shaken.

"Get on the ice!" said Yakov, gesturing angrily towards the clock, which was counting down towards Yuri's last chance to start his free skate. _Twenty, nineteen..._ "Yura, go!"

Yuri took his starting position just in the nick of time. It was not the last thing that he did right that evening, but it was close. His routine was awful, sloppy, purposeless. People always talked about _going through the motions_ and it struck him in the middle of his step sequence how uncannily apt it was. That was just what he was doing. At the end he held his arms out to acknowledge the audience, as you were always meant to do, and could hardly hear the applause over the pounding of the blood in his ears.

It wasn't a complete disaster. Terrible landings but no falls. He'd built up enough of a cushion in the short program that maybe, just maybe...

Sitting on the bench in the Kiss and Cry, Yuri squinted at the scores. Sixth in the free skate, which meant... third overall. There were some scattered cheers from his fans. Yuri set his jaw and stared down the television camera. He refused to look happy about scraping onto the podium by 0.75 of a point.

Yakov patted him on the back, leaned close to his ear to deliver a comment that the microphones wouldn't catch.

"Not so bad. You were worried about Victor but you held it together. A podium is good; you've kept yourself in contention for the Grand Prix Final."

Yuri wanted to scream it: _I wasn't worried about Victor!_

Instead he zipped up his jacket, grabbed as many cat plushies as he could fit into the compass of his arms, and stomped off backstage even before the camera had cut away from the Kiss and Cry.

They retrieved him and dragged him back for the podium ceremony, of course. It was a mockery. He hated podiums even if he won; he felt so self-conscious having to stand there looking reverential through the anthem and then bow his head for some official who probably hated his guts. Winning gold usually made up for that, but this was bronze, which in the scale of indignity at a Grand Prix event practically rated as a participation prize.

Or so he'd felt before he'd started fucking up competitions left and right. He still remembered his first senior Grand Prix, having to settle for silver at Skate Canada after years of winning gold in Juniors. He'd had to stand there on the step below J.J., listening to the stupid Canadian anthem, and had spent those excruciating minutes wishing that he could kill with his mind. (You could tell from the photos.) He'd been so pissed off; he'd thought that gold was his birthright. How young and naive he'd been.

Now he had to stand on the podium in Moscow, with his grandad in the audience, and realise that he was grateful not to have fallen any lower. Looking up not to J.J. but to his smug fucking younger brother, an obnoxious J.J. clone who was just out of juniors (a year later than Yuri) and clearly thought that gold was _his_ birthright.

 _Not only can I not beat Victor,_ thought Yuri, _I can't even win if he's gone._

He wanted to die. But he wanted to kill Paul-Henri Leroy first.

***

Yuri woke the next morning with the sheets tangled around his legs, as if he'd somehow landed in the bed while still spinning from his free skate. Even before he opened his eyes, he felt filtering into his consciousness the certain knowledge that something terrible had happened to him. 

He turned over gingerly and found that nothing ached too badly apart from a few twinges here and there. Emboldened, he yanked his legs out from their cocoon of sheets. That was when the memory came back to him: he'd just thrown away a gold medal at the Rostelecom Cup.

But that wasn't it either. Yuri rolled over, putting a hand underneath the flat pillow to try to scrunch some life back into it. What could possibly be worse than bombing at Rostelecom? Had he made a really stupid joke in front of one of the ISU officials? Had he accidentally taken something with ephedra in it? Had someone told him that Otabek had a girlfriend or something?

No. Crap. It was Victor. _Victor._

Yuri groaned, stretching both of his arms out full length and pointing one toe at the ceiling. It was so unfair. If he was going to wake up with an unspecified sense of doom, couldn't he at least blame it on a creepy dream? (Once he'd dreamt it was autumn, but that there was a weird crack in reality, which meant that all the birch trees were turning a _wrong_ , unreal color of yellow. He hadn't been able to look at anything yellow for days afterwards without shivering in horror. He had never admitted this to anyone.)

At the very least he thought it wasn't too much to ask that he should come by his angst honestly, because of his own screw-ups. God knew he had enough to reproach himself for. Why the hell should he suffer just because Victor had screwed up one of his stupid jumps in a season when he shouldn't even have been competing in the first place? Why did he even care?

He reached automatically for the phone under his pillow before remembering that Lilia had taken it away again last night. _Crap, crap._ The competition was over – was she worried that he was going to psych himself out before the gala, or what? No one else was this strict with their students about social media other than Stephane Lambiel, and that Yuri could forgive because he was young enough to actually know what he was forbidding.

Yuri was so desperate for news that he got up to get the remote and actually turned on the TV like an old person. Thankfully he was in Russia: Match TV had given up the hockey season entirely in favor of wall-to-wall Victor Nikiforov coverage. They even had some poor junior reporter standing outside the hospital with precisely zero news to show for it.

And there was a replay of the practice session, courtesy of some obsessed fan with a telephoto lens. Victor winding up for his jump – Yuri saw himself gliding past in a corner of the frame, out of focus – and then the landing. _Oh fuck._ It looked even worse on television than it did in Yuri's memory. The way Victor staggered when he hit the ice. The little shower of ice. The way he didn't fall, refused to fall.

And then they showed it in fucking slow motion for good measure. Yuri took the opportunity to check whether the strapping on his big toe was holding up. It wasn't; it was all gummy and gross. Figured.

He looked back at the television just in time to see the video of the aftermath: himself skating up to Victor, inclining his head to say something that none of the onlookers would have been able to catch.

 _Yuri Plisetsky,_ said the earnest commentator, _showing concern for the welfare of his rinkmate._

He could only imagine what people must be saying online – and he had to imagine it, because he didn't have his damn phone. He contemplated just going down the hall to Yakov and Lilia's room to bang on the door and demand it back, but decided against it because he'd resolved never again to turn up at their hotel room without warning. There were things that couldn't be unseen or unheard.

Instead he ordered a three-egg omelette from room service and then lay on his stomach on the bed, stuffing it methodically into his mouth while he watched Match TV conjuring up the lamentations and prayers of an entire nation.

 _Have Victor Nikiforov's dreams of a 4th Olympic Games been shattered forever?_ asked the caption at the bottom of the screen.

The question remained an open one half an hour later, when Yakov let himself into the room after a perfunctory warning knock. Lilia came right behind him. Yuri hurriedly flipped to the next channel: Premier League football. Like anyone would believe he'd been watching that.

"I'm glad you've eaten already," said Yakov, glancing at the empty plate.

Yuri sat up awkwardly. Lying with his chin propped on his hands for so long, he'd practically lost the feeling in his arms.

"What is it?" He grimaced as he experimentally wiggled his fingers. "It's like nine in the morning. The gala isn't for hours."

Yakov frowned as if he ought to have known. "We're leaving for the hospital now to visit Victor. You can come."

"I don't want to see him," said Yuri.

"This isn't the time to be difficult, Yura! He's not flying back with us to Piter. He'll be in hospital for days, maybe weeks, he'll need surgery. He may go abroad. They're still consulting with specialists. This is your chance."

"I don't want to see him!" insisted Yuri, his voice rising to a shriller pitch than he would have liked.

Lilia and Yakov exchanged glances, as if to say _how highly strung, what a prima donna._

"It's not obligatory," said Lilia. "But it would be a good idea. I'm certain he'd like to see you."

"I'm not," mumbled Yuri.

They tried; they did. But it was obvious that Yuri was a lost cause, and in the end they left without him.

Only then did Yuri realise that he'd forgotten to ask for his phone back.

***

Three days after Rostelecom, Victor was in Vienna having surgery to have screws put into his back.

Only a couple of hours after the surgery – which had lasted most of the day – there were photos up on his Instagram, social media whore that he was. Victor was lying flat on his back in the hospital bed wearing a brace on his neck and a pale blue hospital gown that made him look even more washed out than usual. There were oxygen tubes stuck up his nose. He was smiling and doing a V sign for the camera, obviously doped to the eyeballs on opioids. 

(Of course Yuri knew what that looked like, he had cousins, didn't he? And a mother.)

The caption said: _Already on the road to recovery!_

Despite the smile, he looked old, and faded, and _tired_. He looked broken. He looked human, which was the one thing that the Living Legend could never be. 

Yuri was so glad that he hadn't gone to see Victor in the hospital. He couldn't bear it. He looked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are literally about three girls skating the Black Swan this season alone. Yuri's program is inspired by none of them. His, of course, is far more awesome.
> 
> Victor's program is inspired by Wayne McGregor's [_Chroma_](https://youtu.be/2SMmL6kIx-w?t=1m45s), which is indeed set to a White Stripes remix.
> 
> I've borrowed John and Megan, the English Eurosport commentators, from Nineveh_UK's excellent [In the Studio](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8576050).


	7. Chapter 7

Yuri got so many of his wishes. He was just cursed to regret all of them afterwards.

First, Victor had been forced to abandon his season, struck down by fate as effectively as Jeff Gillooly had struck down Nancy Kerrigan, and with much less risk of criminal sanction. Second, in his first meeting with the press after his injury, he had declared his intention of going to Hasetsu – 'home to Hasetsu,' he'd said – to start the long rehabilitation process.

He flew straight to Japan as soon as he was cleared to travel. Katsuki traveled to Piter alone to collect Makkachin and make arrangements to ship their belongings. He was only there for two days, and Yuri never saw him. He only leaned against the boards during his on-ice breaks, staring out through the big plate glass windows at the Neva, imagining that he could see the moving van parked outside Victor's building on the other side of the river.

Yuri wasn't likely to see either one of them again for a long while. That, too, was a thing he'd wished for once.

***

A year ago, Yuri had beat Katsuki at the Grand Prix Final. They ought to have crossed paths there this year too, but another lackluster performance at Skate America had left Yuri seventh in the rankings, hoping for a withdrawal that never came.

By contrast, Russian nationals were his alone. Victor was injured and Georgi had retired. Retired from competition, at least. In an apparent fit of insanity, Eurosport had asked him to do some commentary for the season – and even more improbably, the Russian public apparently was coming to adore his mix of nearly current gossip and passionately sympathetic outbursts on behalf of his favorites. 

(Yuri never watched Russian skating coverage anyway. It was, quite literally, too close to home.)

"People are connecting emotionally with what I'm doing!" said Georgi as his cameraman set up for the pre-competition interviews. Apparently this was a new feeling. You had to wonder what all those years of competitive skating had been good for. "It's so affirming, Yura."

Not that commentary took up that much of his time. As he explained to Yuri, he was devoting himself and his Eurosport income to the little farm that he'd bought near Veliky Novogorod, experimenting with a return to the land like Levin in _Anna Karenina_. Now he only had to find the right person to share it with...

Yuri crossed his arms and interrupted. "Are we going to do this interview or what?"

"Now Yura, remember, don't talk to me like I'm Gosha from the rink. This works best if we maintain a certain... distance."

"I can't take this seriously," Yuri said, rolling his eyes.

Still, once the camera lights came on, he forgot about Georgi being Georgi, and remembered all too well that a whole nation was watching him expectantly.

"This is Georgi Popovich, here with Yuri Plisetsky before the start of Russian nationals. Yuri, what do you think of your competition?"

"What competition?"

He hadn't even intended to be arrogant. He just couldn't think of any. 

Georgi laughed. "Well, there's Alexander Velikov, Tamara Trusova's student. He's gone well in the ISU Challenger series so far..."

He was twenty, short, and long past his growth spurt (if indeed he had ever had one). His approach to quads could best be summarised as 'jump and pray.' Unlike Yakov's skaters, he had no technique.

"Tamara Trusova doesn't know how to coach men," said Yuri. 

Yakov wouldn't shout at him for saying that; Yakov himself said it all the time.

"But your own skating has hardly shied away from exploring your feminine side. Last year, Agape... and this year, skating to _Swan Lake_ , a classic, romantic theme..."

"It has nothing to do with being feminine." _Idiot._ Georgi knew that. "It's about how you jump. You know, mechanics."

"Your fans were shattered not to see you at the Grand Prix Final this year. I know that everyone in Russia has been empathizing, feeling your pain as you struggle to grow into manhood..."

"Any idiot can get taller," said Yuri. "Quads are hard."

"Do you think you'll be able to bring your best performance to Nationals?"

Yuri didn't even have to think about it. He said something he hadn't dared to say for a while. "Sure. I'll crush them all."

"And I'm sure you'll be skating for our old rinkmate Victor Nikiforov, twelve-time winner of Nationals, who isn't able to compete this year after that terrible spinal injury."

 _Oh fuck._ What a trap. Yuri tried to fashion a simulacrum of Victor's fake press smile.

"Of course. I'll win it for him. Just like you would have."

He'd meant it to be sarcastic; poor Georgi had made a career of coming second to Victor at Nationals. But Georgi seemed to take it entirely seriously. He'd never had a great grasp of sarcasm.

"And... we're clear," said the cameraman. "Great."

"Great interview," echoed Georgi. "Thanks Yura."

A terrible thought occurred to Yuri.

"Tell me," he said slowly, "that you're not going to interview Anya."

***

So Yuri Plisetsky won Russian Nationals for the first time, aged nearly seventeen – by default. He was Russia's hero now, for lack of anyone better. It felt fucking empty.

He stood on the top step of the podium getting death glares from Alexander Velikov (oh, how he knew about those) while the national anthem played. All he could think about was that Victor had been barely sixteen when he'd first won at Nationals, his first senior competition after winning the Junior Grand Prix. Yuri was behind once again.

And, perhaps worst of all, he'd said publicly that he'd won it for Victor.

***

Meanwhile, Katsuki was killing every competition he entered. 

Yuri watched his triumphant Grand Prix Final free program on his laptop in the small hours of the morning, fiercely sniffing back a runny nose, some sudden allergy. Then he snuck quietly into the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. By the time that he had to face Yakov and Lilia at breakfast, his eyes were only a little bit bloodshot. Hardly noticeable.

Katsuki won gold in Japanese nationals by an utterly ridiculous margin; he probably could have improvised his free program on the spot and still won. Another gold at Four Continents, his score insultingly far beyond J.J.'s in second place. It was exactly how Yuri had always wanted to see him skate; it was exactly the way he wanted to skate himself. He was so painfully jealous.

 _Still gaining new confidence and inspiration from Victor Nikiforov's coaching,_ said the commentators. _With his PCS scores, now that he's landing all five quads consistently, he's unstoppable._

In other words, if they could have said it on TV: _now that he's giving it to Victor on the regular, he can finally let himself say 'fuck you world, I'm the best.'_

People had even started calling Katsuki 'the next Victor Nikiforov,' which was laughable. They were completely different as skaters; they were completely different in every way, apart from being inexplicably able to put up with one another. It was like people thought that 'winning lots of competitions' was all that it took to be Victor Nikiforov (which was amusingly insulting to Victor as well). 

Not that it made Yuri feel any better about watching the press conference after Four Continents, when Katsuki just blushed and gave Victor bedroom eyes while mumbling something about how he could never, ever replace him.

"Don't say that!" shouted Yuri at the television that evening. "Say it's an insult! It's Yuuri Katsuki who's winning all the golds now! Why the fuck would you want to be Victor anyway?"

Lilia looked up from her knitting, glanced at Yakov with an eyebrow raised.

"He's not used to anyone else being compared to Vitya," said Yakov in an undertone, as if Yuri weren't sitting right there next to him on the couch.

"I don't want to be Victor Nikiforov either!" said Yuri. "Ugh. Kill me now."

"Quite right," said Lilia. "You can never become exceptional while standing in someone else's shadow."

All very true. But if anyone was going to have the right to indignantly deny being the next Victor Nikiforov, it was going to be Yuri Plisetsky.

***

Yuri ought to have known that something was up when Yakov insisted on taking him to the banya that Sunday morning. Still, it wasn't entirely unusual: Yakov did it every so often when he got tired of coming across a total slavedriver. It was supposed to be time for bonding or some shit like that. 

Yakov had booked a private room at Mytninskie Banya, because he insisted that any banya that wasn't wood-fired was an abomination. The private room was a concession either to Yuri's celebrity or to his modesty. Being in the showers at the rink was one thing, he was used to that, but getting naked in the _banya_ – skinny and pale and bruised all over – was different. (And the _onsen_ in Hasetsu had been excruciating, but that had mostly been because of Katsuki.)

Yakov was old enough not to give a shit how he looked, probably because he knew he was old enough that giving a shit wouldn't make any difference. He was old and saggy, with a big belly and a chest covered in greying hair, and he didn't even seem to notice. On his way through the changing room he shed his clothes offhandedly, one by one, without a pause in his grumbling about how bad the traffic had gotten in Piter.

"It's beyond ridiculous," he concluded. "Coming, Yura? Come on!"

After throwing off his own clothes all in a rush, Yuri followed him into the _banya_. Yakov had plopped himself down on one of the top benches. He threw a massive dipperful of water on the coals, pulled his felt hat down over his ears, and settled back with his eyes closed for a first round of heat. 

Once he got over a steam-induced coughing fit, Yuri settled himself on a lower bench and waited for the relaxation to steal over him. It always seemed to take longer for him than it did for Yakov. He lay back on the bench, but it was hard to get comfortable when the wood was so hard against his shoulder blades. He supposed Yakov had more padding than he did.

However relaxing it was meant to be, Yakov ran a trip to the _banya_ like a military operation. So many minutes in the steam followed by a plunge in the cold pool. So many minutes in the steam followed by a bucket of ice water over the head. By then, the venik had finished soaking so he was ready for a good round of lashing.

"Whatever the doctors may think," he said, lying expectantly face down on the wooden bench, "there's nothing better for the health. Reduces blood pressure, inflammation, stress, increases the circulation, everything. Right, Yura, I'm ready. Don't hold back."

Yuri took up the bundle of oak twigs and leaves, gave it a preparatory shake or two, and began to lay into Yakov's back. It was oddly satisfying revenge for all those hours that Yakov had spent shouting at him on the ice. Whether or not it was actually good for Yakov's blood pressure, it was certainly good for Yuri's soul.

Yakov groaned with satisfaction. "Now the legs."

Yuri had to wonder whether there was some clause buried in the depths of his coaching contract with Yakov that said he had to act as unpaid _masseuse_ for a minimum of four Sundays per year. Maybe there was. If so, he certainly wouldn't have known about it, because his grandfather had signed it on his behalf. Yuri was old enough to give himself, body and soul, to skating – but he was too young to sign a contract. That was life for you.

Still, one good thing about going to the _banya_ with Yakov was that he was a captive audience. It was particularly good today, because there was a ticklish subject that Yuri had been meaning to bring up with him.

It was about Yuuri Katsuki.

The Figure Skating Federation of Russia had started making noises in the press about how easy, how really trivial it would be for Katsuki to gain Russian citizenship. No doubt the government would be amenable to rushing it through – before the Olympics, even – now that he was married to a Russian and dividing his time between Saint Petersburg and Japan. If, for example, he wanted an afterlife competing by Victor's side as an ice dancer, perhaps it would be best to sort out the citizenship issue now. Yuko Kavaguti had done it, after all. Their door was open.

If it was true, if Katsuki was considering the idea, then it would be a complete fucking disaster – for Yuri, needless to say. He needed another top-flight Russian competitor like he needed a hole in the head.

Unfortunately, Yuri had no clue whether it was another of the Figure Skating Federation of Russia's random obnoxious ideas, or whether Katsuki was actually considering it. He would have kneecapped himself sooner than ask Katsuki; he would have taken a swim in gasoline and set himself on fire sooner than ask Victor. So that left Yakov.

Yuri gave Yakov one more really good lash, then decided to give his aching arm a rest (off-ice training hadn't prepared him for this) by putting the _venik_ on his back and pushing on it. This, according to Yakov, was also good for your health, God only knew why.

He cleared his throat. "So, did you hear what the RFSF was saying about, uh, Katsuki?"

" _Hear_ about it? They won't leave me alone. I'm not even his coach, I don't know why they think I have any leverage. Push harder, Yura, don't be shy. It gets the oils into the skin."

Yuri pushed harder. "But, uh, like..."

"Oh, they're the most wishful of thinkers. It's nonsense. Even if it weren't, I wouldn't be a party to Yuuri Katsuki's defection."

It wasn't the word Yuri had been expecting. "Defection?" 

"People asked _me_ , you know," said Yakov darkly. "But I never entertained the idea."

Light finally dawned. "At Lake Placid, you mean?"

The 1980 Olympics seemed like the depths of time. Yakov was like those prehistoric, antediluvian fishes that people pulled up from the Mariana Trench; you looked at pictures of them, all whiskery and blinking, and found it impossible to imagine that they had once been all there was in the world. But Yakov had once been the best – well, nearly the best, he'd only taken bronze – and he'd skated for the Soviet Union.

"I could have stayed in America," said Yakov. "I could have had American citizenship if I'd wanted. They would have fallen over themselves to give it to me, back then."

Every once in a while both Yakov and Lilia got in these Soviet moods, when they cared about things and talked about things in a way that was utterly incomprehensible to Yuri. He'd been born in 2000, after all; the whole of the twentieth century sometimes seemed to him like a bizarre collective hallucination that had thankfully evaporated just before his advent on the scene. Even Victor – who sometimes, for reasons known only to himself, liked to boast about having been 'a Soviet baby!' – didn't actually remember the USSR.

"So why didn't you?"

Yakov shrugged, not in a storytelling mood. He never felt like talking much in the _banya_ , which was just fine by Yuri. 

"Because I am Russian," he said finally, like that answered everything, or like he didn't want to talk about it anymore. "And Yuuri Katsuki is Japanese. I don't think you have anything to worry about."

"I wasn't worried," said Yuri.

Yakov got up to pour more hot water on the coals, then took up the _venik_ once again. He gestured firmly towards one of the benches with it; it was Yuri's turn, whether he liked it or not. Yuri took his towel, folded it to make a little pillow, and then lay down on the bench, face down.

"I hear that Vitya is back on the ice," said Yakov finally.

Bringing up a topic like this here was a desecration of the _banya_ , thought Yuri, and an insult to the steam. He sucked in a breath as Yakov got in a good whack, catching the corner of the big bruise on his side. Way to add insult to injury. 

"You hear? From who?"

"From Vitya," said Yakov. 

Yuri looked up at Yakov, over his shoulder, and saw the slightest quirk of a smile. He reflected that he shouldn't have asked, if he didn't want to know. You would have thought that Yakov and Victor might be suffering another breakdown in diplomatic relations, like when Victor had gone to Hasetsu for the first time, but apparently Yakov had forgiven him for deciding to do his rehab in a nowhere town in Japan rather than at the best equipped sport club in Russia. And apparently they were now talking on the sly; Yuri hadn't thought that Yakov was capable of using Skype without his help. Maybe Lilia was helping instead.

"It'll probably be on Instagram soon," Yakov added.

"You think he's going to come back here?" asked Yuri, trying to sound like he was making casual conversation. "To train. If he is training."

"Who the hell knows? It's Vitya. If I heard tomorrow he'd applied for _Japanese_ citizenship, I wouldn't be remotely surprised."

"Yeah," said Yuri. "He's fucking ridiculous."

A long pause, like Yakov was weighing up whether to agree with him or tell him off. In the end, he did neither.

"But, yes, he is training," he said, almost wistfully. "And he knows where to find me." 

***

Apparently the trip to the _banya_ was only a warmup for the greatest indignity of all: Yakov was taking Yuri to see a sports psychologist. He didn't tell him until Yuri was already sitting in the car, still damp and languid and tingly from the _banya_. Apparently Yakov considered him a flight risk.

"What?!" said Yuri. All of his hard-earned relaxation seemed to melt away in one horrible instant. "I don't need to see a psychologist."

"You can land a quad toe loop. You can land a quad salchow, even though you think you can't. Therefore the problem is not your abilities; it's between the ears."

"It's because I'm growing!" Yuri protested.

Yakov was implacable. "It _was_ because of your growth spurt. It isn't anymore."

No one could deliver a hard truth like Yakov. Yuri had seen sickly sweet American coaches patting their skaters on the back after shitty performances, saying things like _it's coming together, you'll get it next time._ Even now, Yakov respected Yuri too much to lie to him. Yuri appreciated that. Not that it was helping to convince him or anything.

Yuri crossed his arms. "You can make me go, but you can't make me talk to him. It'll be a waste of an hour."

"Whether or not you decide to get anything out of the experience," said Yakov, "is entirely up to you."

By the time they got to the psychologist's, Yuri still hadn't decided. But he knew that certain ground rules had to be laid down right away.

He walked into the guy's office, sat down, and folded his arms. "I'm not going to talk about my mother."

The guy had the balls to look amused. "I wasn't planning to ask you about your mother. I'm not that sort of psychologist." 

"Good!"

"We're going to focus on your performance. And what you need to do to reach your peak performance."

"I've already reached my peak," muttered Yuri. "I was fifteen years old."

"What makes you say that?" 

"Uh, I haven't won gold at anything since then? I mean, Russian nationals doesn't count, nobody who mattered was competing."

"Is that so?"

Was this guy dumb or something?

"Victor Nikiforov wasn't competing," Yuri slowly explained, like he was talking to a dim five-year-old.

"And it's not really a victory unless you beat him?"

"Yeah. Obviously."

Was this news to anyone? Anyone at all in the world? 

Yuri rolled his eyes and sighed deeply. It was going to be a long hour.

***

Worlds were in Helsinki that year, for once an easy journey from Saint Petersburg. They got on the train in the mid-afternoon and would be in Helsinki in time for dinner. Last year the trip to Boston had been such a production. Last year, Victor and Katsuki had been with them on the plane, Katsuki abashedly wearing Victor's team jacket as if it would camouflage him in the midst of the Russian team. Now they were a diminished group of only four on the train: Yuri sitting next to Mila, with Yakov and Lilia across the aisle. 

Yuri leaned his head against the chilly glass of the window, stared out at the twilit expanses of snow and bare birch trees whipping past. Mila had already yelled at him twice for trying to read her book over her shoulder. It wasn't like he gave a damn about Victor Pelevin, werewolves or not, but it also wasn't like there was anything better to do. His phone sat idle in his inner pocket, but he didn't want to see any of his mentions at the moment.

"Hey," he said to Mila. "Move. I want to get up."

"You just went half an hour ago," she replied, not looking up from her book. "Is your bladder that microscopic?"

Yuri nudged – some might have said kicked – Mila in the calf. "Shut up, hag. I'm not going to pee. Let me up."

"Ow! If that shows through my tights tomorrow I'm going to kill you."

It wasn't worth having this stupid argument. Ignoring her protests, he just climbed over her.

Across the aisle, Yakov frowned. "On your best behavior," he said in a warning rumble.

But it wasn't as if anyone else had noticed. The carriage was half empty; at the other end of it there was a big group of Finns who'd loaded up on duty-free booze and almost certainly didn't care about the upcoming ISU World Figure Skating Championships.

Yuri pushed past them into the vestibule between cars. He stopped for a few seconds standing in the connector, watching the rubber seal accordioning around him and feeling the tiny puffs of cold air that leaked in from outside. It was a mistake, because that was where Yakov caught up with him.

Yakov took him firmly by the arm before he could escape. "I've seen this before, Yura. I won't have you working yourself into a state."

"God, I'm not working myself into a state! Can't I go to the café car without it turning into an international incident?"

"The café car is in the other direction."

 _Damn._ Yuri folded his arms and sighed. "I'm just stretching my legs. Did you want to talk to me or something?"

Surely everything that could be said had been said already. The sixth place at Worlds last year, the sports psychologist, the quad salchow that Yakov had insisted on withdrawing from his program, all of it. Yuri was so tired of listening.

"Look, Yura," said Yakov. "You're only seventeen years old and you're competing at Worlds for the second time. That's good. You're entirely capable of getting on the podium; all the ability is there. But I want your sights on the bigger prize, the Olympics next year. There's no pressure. This is just a stepping stone. You only have to finish fifteenth or better to win us two slots at the Olympics."

Yakov had stopped shouting at him months ago. It was a sign of how far he had fallen. Fifteenth! It was ridiculous even to suggest; he couldn't remember the last time he'd finished fifteen at anything. He would far rather have had Yakov making a huge scene right there on the Allegro train, screaming at him about how he couldn't get away with this incompetence for much longer, about what a disappointment he was to everyone. After all, they both knew it was true.

Worst of all, Yuri knew the real reason that Yakov cared about Russia getting two male singles skaters to the Olympics: he was keeping that second slot open for Victor Nikiforov.

If Yuri had followed his instincts, he would have shouted _fuck you!_ , kicked the wall, and spent the rest of the train journey locked away in the toilet. But he was seventeen now, not a child, and he could control his emotions better than that.

"Yeah, piece of fucking cake," he said. "Can I go and buy my Diet Coke now?"

Yakov shrugged, wordlessly held his arm towards the door in invitation. Yuri went.

In the café car, handing over the coins to the cashier, he realised that his hands were slick with sweat.

***

It was too much to hope for a Worlds without Victor Nikiforov. 

He was there, naturally, as Katsuki's coach. Backstage, before the very first practice session, Yuri saw that familiar head of silver hair appear in the midst of a sea of people, a revenant that he couldn't shake however hard he tried.

Despite knowing that Victor was already back on the ice in Hasetsu, he'd always imagined him on crutches for this first meeting. Or, if you didn't need crutches after back surgery, at least hobbling a little. But Victor came rushing over to Yuri's side without the slightest hesitation and gave him a big, vigorous hug that half lifted him off his feet. As if he was trying to make a point or something.

Since he'd last seen Victor at Rostelecom, Yuri had kept growing. He was 177 centimeters now, way taller than Katsuki. You would have thought that the least he deserved in exchange for all this suffering was to be taller than Victor too. Surely that back surgery, fusing a vertebra or whatever it was, should have wiped a few centimetres off his height? But, standing there in Victor's embrace, the awful truth became clear: Victor was still – just – taller. There was no justice in this life.

Maybe, thought Yuri, he was wearing lifts. That would be just like him.

Victor was going on about how much he wished he was competing at Worlds, but how good it was to be here with Katsuki. All the usual bullshit. Not a word about how Yuri had refused to come and see him at the hospital in Moscow, how they had barely exchanged a text since then. Yuri wondered whether Victor had simply forgotten, whether he didn't care, or whether he was simply burying it like he buried every other unhappiness.

Yuri gritted his teeth. "Do you have a giant scar?" he asked, making an effort at a remark that could pass for polite conversation.

"No, actually, it's really very small." Victor held his thumb and forefinger about ten centimeters apart. "Like that."

Yakov, coming past, turned to Victor and said, totally deadpan: "Vitya, it's inappropriate to talk to Yura about your dick."

Yuri snorted with laughter. Victor seemed like he hardly noticed.

"It's been so much physio," he said. "You have no idea."

"Every skater knows what physio is like," said Yuri dismissively.

"It isn't the same," said Victor. "Not at all."

He smiled afterwards, but it was one of those horrific smiles of Victor's where you could see the abyss yawning beneath.

***

It was yawning beneath Yuri as well.

He finished seventeenth at Worlds. Got beaten by both J.J. and Paul-Henri. Got beaten by Minami fucking Kenjirou. (Or was it Kenjirou fucking Minami? He could never remember which way round it went.) Got beaten by half the elite skaters in the world. Alexander Velikov, his only Russian rival, didn't even make it to the free skate, but that was zero consolation.

His own free skate was a horrorshow. His first quad was an utter abortion, more a flail in the air even than a clean single, and it just went downhill from there. He stepped off the ice with his head spinning, hardly remembering what on earth had happened to him. That was a small mercy.

 _Well, I'm going to the Olympics, anyway,_ he thought, sitting in the Kiss and Cry with Yakov a silent, unreadable presence by his side. _Who cares that there's only one slot? It's mine. The only way Victor will get there now is if they push him onto the ice in a wheelchair. Gold in the Paralympics for Victor Nikiforov._

He imagined Yuuri ice dancing with Victor in a wheelchair, the slide of the wheels across the rink, the awkwardness of cornering, and found himself caught by a burst of inappropriate, unstoppable black laughter that he was certain all the spectators would think was tears.

Hell, even Yakov thought it was tears, he had his hand on Yuri's shoulder.

Hell, it _was_ tears, his face was wet. _Fuck, fuck._

Yuri hid his face against the big plush cat he was holding. He was seventeen now, he was far too old for this shit.

***

Surprising precisely no one, Katsuki won at Worlds. He beat J.J. Leroy into second by an immensely satisfying seven point margin; Guang Hong came third.

Yuri snuck into the post-ceremony press conference after it had already started, wanting to avoid anyone spotting him and asking for a quick quote. He didn't know why he was there at all, apart from the fact that he was obviously a masochist. He crouched down at the back in the middle of all the power cords from the television cameras, concealing himself behind the random Finnish reporters who were just there because Worlds was in Helsinki and obviously didn't give a fuck about skating. He was in no danger of being recognised here. One guy was even idly playing Candy Crush on his phone; Yuri approved.

At the front of the room, Katsuki was giving the world's press his intense face. His glossy, slicked-back hair shone like a raven's wing in the television lights. _No, crap,_ thought Yuri, _that was a stupid analogy_ – but he did have great hair. He wasn't wearing his glasses. Either he didn't want to be able to see people's faces or Victor had finally made him get contacts.

"I want to thank everyone who has supported and believed in me through my career as a competitive skater," he was saying. He went through a long list of names, including Yakov, and of course ending with Victor. No mention of Yuri. Yuri tuned out for a few moments; he knew the tooth-rotting sappiness that would follow. "I know I haven't always repaid the faith you've shown in me, but my success this year has been beyond anything I could have dreamt. I am so grateful. I feel I have achieved everything I could have wanted in competitive skating. For that reason, I've decided to retire now."

"No!" said Yuri involuntarily, but his exclamation was thankfully lost in the hubbub of the room.

"Aren't you interested in winning a medal at the Olympics?" shouted one reporter.

"Of course I'm interested. Who wouldn't be? But Victor's injury has given me perspective. I'm twenty-six now, and I don't believe in being greedy. I want to finish while I can appreciate what I have. I've been so lucky. So, so lucky."

He bowed deeply; once, twice, three times, like a nervous tic repeated. Victor laid a hand on his back.

"Mr. Nikiforov!" shouted another reporter, one of the Russians. (It figured.) "Are you planning to retire as well?"

Yuri's heart skipped a beat.

Victor left a long pause before answering, tapping his finger thoughtfully against his upper lip. His hair fell across one eye.

"Not yet," he said finally. 

There was a collective exhalation of breath, a sigh, as if those two words from Victor were still enough to leave a roomful of hardened sports journalists on the verge of coming.

"My rehabilitation is proceeding very well," he added. "My doctors are happy. I feel that I have unfinished business as a competitive skater."

"And is there a chance that you might return to competition in time for the Olympics next year?"

Naturally they couldn't leave it alone. Even with the 2017 World champion sitting right by his side, no one was interested in anyone but Our Lord and Savior Victor.

"Of course! I'm planning on it."

Another journalist leapt into the breach left by that answer. "But after Yuri Plisetsky's unexpectedly poor performance here at Worlds, Russia will only be able to send one man to Pyeongchang."

"Then I'm sure they'll select the best man to compete," said Victor with a shit-eating grin. "Experience and consistency are what matters when it comes to a stage as big as the Olympics. The FSFR knows that."

He didn't even mention Yuri. That was the worst thing of all.

***

Yuri didn't go to the banquet. It wouldn't have been a good idea; someone would have ended up with a tray of shrimp cocktail dumped over their head. And it wouldn't have been him.

Instead he slumped back against the thousands of pillows on his hotel bed, chin resting on his fist, trying to think of something better to do. Lilia had finally given him back his phone, but there was nothing he wanted to look at now. Even the Yuri's Angels were talking about Victor.

He could have gone out, but – he tossed the phone onto the bed next to him and got up, bruised muscles and battered feet protesting painfully, to look out the window. Pulling the heavy curtain aside, all he could see was the orange of sodium streetlights and big wet clumps of slush falling out of the sky. A gusting wind blew it spattering onto the glass. March in Helsinki. God, he hated being a winter athlete sometimes. He never got to go anywhere decent.

Yuri was still holding the curtain, studying the dim Helsinki skyline in search of inspiration, when his phone pinged. At first he ignored it. It was probably Yakov, telling him off for not having fun at the banquet, just like he'd told him off for having too much fun at the Grand Prix Final in 2015.

But at least it was a good excuse to let go of the curtain and stop letting all the cold air in. Yuri went to grab his phone. It wasn't Yakov.

 **Bek:** _Hey, you OK?_

He didn't even know how to start answering that. He had never realised that there were so many different gradations of 'not OK' in the world. Taxonomies of 'not OK,' phylum, genus and species. (All he remembered from biology last year.)

He stared at the phone, punched the keyboard from English to Cyrillic to Japanese (installed just in case) and back again, but he didn't feel particularly capable of composing an answer in any alphabet. 

A minute or two later, another ping from his phone.

 **Bek:** _This banquet is boring._

Yuri thumbed his phone across to Instagram. It certainly didn't look boring. Mila had just posted a selfie of herself, in an off-the-shoulder dress that almost – but not quite – made it look like she actually had tits, licking some ice dancer's cheek. Yakov was going to fucking kill her.

And Otabek was obviously lying to make him feel better.

Another couple of minutes later there was another ping.

 **Bek:** _Want to come to my room and play Fifa?_

Otabek felt sorry for him, Yuri knew it – and right now there was nothing he wanted less than pity.

He sighed and turned off the phone.

***

Sometimes Yuri felt like he spent most of his life trying not to be recognised. The hoodie wasn't good enough anymore; people recognised the hoodie. Maybe he should get some really dark sunglasses or... _no, damn._ He couldn't do that; Victor wore dark sunglasses. (Though Yuri had always assumed it was just to be pretentious.)

This was what he got for being responsible for once. He'd cleaned up his hotel room, packed his suitcase, even gone to reception to check out, just like they'd told him to do. Here he was, standing in the hotel lobby right on time, and where were Yakov and Lilia? Nowhere to be found! Typical.

Around him, coaches and competitors and judges and officials were all rushing to check out and get to the airport before the blizzard blew in, trading sneers, smug looks, air kisses and fake smiles. _See you next year, better luck next time!_

He didn't want any part of it. Hurriedly, he looked around for the least obnoxious person in the room. No sign of Otabek, not that he was sure he could face Otabek either..

Finally he spotted Katsuki enveloped by an oversized couch and a familiar looking Sochi Olympics jacket (Team Russia, naturally), staring fixedly at his phone. Yuri plopped down in a chair across from him. Katsuki didn't even look up. Probably he was racking his brain for what he could say.

_Shit, it's Plisetsky, try to think of something supportive! Uh... 'Hey, so I saw you finished seventeenth at Worlds, I never did that badly even when I was a walking dumpster fire so I can't say I know how you feel, sucks to be you, sorry.' No, idiot, you can't say that! Just keep staring at your phone, pretend you haven't noticed him, maybe he'll give up and go away._

Yuri took pity on Katsuki and decided to help him out. Best to try an easier line of conversation. He leaned forward, raising his voice to cut through the background noise.

"So, is Victor insane or what? Does he have a death wish? Why doesn't he just retire already?"

Katsuki looked startled. Weird. Maybe he really hadn't noticed Yuri. Or he was a really good actor.

"Oh! Yurio! I didn't see you there!"

"Well?" said Yuri. 

And that just came across as demanding. Why did he get like this with Katsuki? He never ended up sounding how he meant to sound. It was a curse, like not being able to land a quad lutz.

"I don't know!" said Katsuki. "First he called me selfish for wanting him to keep competing. Now he thinks I'm selfish for wanting him to retire."

"Huh," said Yuri, a huff of derision. "He's fucked in the head." 

"I wouldn't put it that way," said Katsuki. His tone was measured; it wasn't exactly a denial.

"You're really going to let him do quads with a spine full of, like, screws from IKEA."

(The analogy had amused Yuri briefly: _VICTOR Figure Skater, 180cm, assembly required._ )

"I don't think there's anything I can do anything about it."

(Yuri blinked, remembering a silent, sudden embrace from Victor at the Grand Prix Final. _Does that mean that Katsudon's retiring?_ Victor's silver hair falling across his face. He shook his head to banish the memories again.)

He and Katsuki looked at each other. It was as if they were separated by a great chasm, not just a glass-topped coffee table with a display of dried flowers.

"I..."

But Yuri didn't know what to say next. He felt abruptly self-conscious, realising that Katsuki probably thought he wanted Victor out of the way for his own selfish reasons. That Katsuki probably thought he was afraid to compete against Victor, even a Victor who was half man and half IKEA bookcase. 

When in fact... well, it wasn't like he _cared_ about Victor, but he didn't want to see him turned into a dribbling vegetable. It wouldn't be fair to Katsuki and it would probably upset Yakov.

Besides, he _wanted_ to compete against Victor. He wanted to compete against Victor at the Olympics. Since he couldn't have that, he wanted Victor to gracefully step aside for the better man. But Victor couldn't see any further than Victor Nikiforov. He never had; he never would.

 _Think of the devil._ There he was now: you could spot that familiar silver head even on the far side of the hotel lobby. It was Victor who ought to wear a hoodie as a disguise. Katsuki's phone pinged; he glanced at it quickly.

"Yuri!" said Victor, coming up breathlessly. "I'm sorry I'm late! I just texted you."

"Ten seconds ago!" said Katsuki.

_Wrong fucking Yuri to apologize to._

Yuri stood up, drew himself to his full height (now equal to Victor's, since he was wearing platform sneakers), and folded his arms.

An uncertain flicker passed across Victor's face. It took a moment before he could shape his lips into the semblance of a smile. "Hello, Yura. I..."

Yuri said nothing, just stared at him.

"We've always been competitors..." began Victor, another attempt.

What, did he expect absolution or something? _Oh no, that's fine Victor, stab me in the back, I know it's just part of your Living Legend routine._

"I saw your press conference. I heard what you said. You're pathetic. I don't want to hear another fucking word."

"You really do despise me," said Victor, a murmur of surprise, the tiniest of ripples visible in his imperturbable surface.

"You just worked that out?"

"I thought it was all in fun."

That was Victor, so self-centered that he could not imagine anyone really hating him. So selfish that he thought he could ask Yuri to forgive him even this final betrayal.

"Fuck you, Victor," said Yuri. The last time he would say it; the first time he really meant it. "Fuck you. I'm done with you."

And he walked off, out of the hotel into the swirling snow, without looking back.

***

(A few minutes later he had to sneak back in, because if he waited for Yakov and Lilia outside, he would have frozen to death. 

By then, Victor and Katsuki were gone, so he had no regrets – it had been a great exit.)


	8. Chapter 8

**Spring 2017**

It wasn't like Yuri cut his hair as a reaction to losing at Worlds or anything. It was just that he thought it was time for a change. 

Originally he thought he would just go for a small undercut, like Otabek had. Then he thought he would shave it all off, but Victor had done that before, for his stupid _gopnik_ exhibition skate. Finally he settled on a topknot look, with the sides fully shaved. It meant he could still have long hair, but it would look more mature, more cool. Sort of a samurai thing. (Nothing to do with Katsuki. He'd never had a topknot, more was the pity.)

He got up early one rest day and went out to the salon while Yakov and Lilia were still ensconced in their bedroom. When he got back an hour and a half later, he was relieved to hear the water running in the shower. At least one of them was busy. He wasn't sure that he could have coped with hearing both of their opinions at once.

Yuri tiptoed into the sitting room and found Lilia sitting at the table with her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. Potya was stretched out on the table, her fluffy tail twitching carelessly across the magazine that Lilia was trying to read. Lilia moved Potya's tail aside with a weariness born of repetition, then glanced up at him.

Her expression changed slowly, more in sadness than in anger. She got to her feet and came over to him, tilting her head as if she wanted to examine him from a different angle.

"I got my hair cut," he said superfluously. "Do you like it?"

"It's not for me to like or dislike it," she said slowly. "You're growing up; naturally you'll change your appearance many times. It's a peculiar haircut, but it will lend itself to some costumes. We'll have to think about that."

"I guess you won't have to do my hair before competitions anymore."

"No."

She lifted one hand to feel the newly-shaven fuzz at the side of his head, as Yuri himself had been doing, half disbelieving, all the way home. (He thought he knew how Makkachin felt after Victor took him to be clipped.) Almost always cold, her hand felt surprisingly warm on his bared skin. It must have been the heat from the coffee cup.

"Not that I minded that or anything," said Yuri. 

"There are still a few things that could be done with it," she said thoughtfully, pursing her lips like she couldn't quite think what they were. Neither could he, but he had faith in Lilia.

Yuri nodded. Lilia let her hand fall again.

"I saw they're showing a cinema relay of the Bolshoi next Sunday," he offered in place of an apology, because he didn't really want to apologise, but he was still a little bit sorry. " _The Flames of Paris._ I know you hate that IMAX place, but it's going to be at the Avrora and Lenfilm too."

What he really wanted to say was _I'll take you_ , but he couldn't say that because he didn't have any money. He'd blown his pocket money for the month on the haircut, and those Bolshoi livestreams were as expensive as hell. So he'd have to settle for the pride of having had the idea in the first place. These days, he had to take his pride where he could get it.

Lilia smiled. "I'd love to go," she said, for all the world as if he _had_ just invited her. "Shall we?"

Every so often Lilia did take him out for the afternoon, like Yakov took him to the _banya_. A girls' day out, awkwardly transposed into the key of seventeen-year-old boy. She would take him to the department store if he needed new clothes, and then for tea at Cafe Singer or the Eliseyev Emporium. If they were full of tourists, Lilia was too grand to notice, leaving Yuri glancing self-consciously around and wondering how he got into these situations. 

He did his best, he really did. Lilia said that learning to make polite conversation and mix in society was an important part of the training of an artist. Yuri thought that if that had been her goal, she probably should have started off with someone different. He'd finally managed to learn that you weren't meant to eat finger sandwiches all in one bite, but beyond that he was sure he was a hopeless case. 

Nonetheless, Lilia hadn't given up on him yet. He was grateful for that. As awkward and excruciating as their afternoons out were, the weird thing was that he actually sort of enjoyed them too.

"Yeah," he said. "Let's."

The sound of the bathroom door opening. Yakov wandered into the sitting room, still damp, towel wrapped around his waist.

"You idiot boy, what have you done with your hair?!"

***

Yuri might not be speaking to Victor anymore, but he was still speaking to Victor's agent and publicist. _His_ agent and publicist, now. He'd been shocked to discover that you didn't actually have to pay them – you just signed a contract saying that you'd pay them some percentage of what you earned. It seemed like you never had to pay for anything up front when you were rich, which explained a lot about rich people.

His grandad had been just as baffled by the idea as he was, leafing through the pages of the contracts – which he had to sign on Yuri's behalf – like they were something from another planet. Which they were.

"If this is what Victor does," he said finally, "then this is what you should do too."

Yuri hated the thought of that, but he wanted – needed – the money, so he'd gone ahead with it. He'd had a few boring meetings with them in shiny offices in Moskva City and then completely forgotten that they existed. After all, he had more important things to worry about.

Then, one day in May, Yakov was sitting with him going through his training schedule for the month when he paused for a moment and scratched the top of his head thoughtfully.

"Oh, yes, I knew there was something else," he said. "I had a call from your agent. They want you to do a photoshoot for the cover of _Vogue Russia_. In Moscow. If you want to do it, I guess we'll have to fit it in here somewhere."

He tapped a callused finger on the training schedule with a weary, resigned familiarity. Victor – who had practically made a career out of stripping off for perfume ads and doing 'world's sexiest man' magazine covers – had always been missing practices for photoshoots. It had driven Yuri crazy too, but he wasn't thinking about that now.

"What?" he said. " _Vogue Russia_? Was Victor busy or something?"

Yakov shrugged indifferently. Lilia bought copies of _Vogue_ in a dozen different international editions and left them scattered across the table where she kept her art books, but Yuri suspected that Yakov had never once peeked inside them. It wasn't like Yuri read them either. He only looked at them for costume ideas, which didn't count.

"They wanted you," said Yakov.

"Huh," said Yuri. "OK."

***

It turned out that the money they were offering him was shit, insulting. He had made more coming in fifth at Skate Canada. But he said yes anyway. 

Partly this was because Victor's publicist – he hadn't yet succeeded in thinking of her as his own publicist – had said that it would be good exposure. Whatever that meant. (Probably if Victor had flashed some poor soul in a park, his publicist would just have said _wow, that's amazing exposure_.) But mostly he did it because he'd been asked, and Victor hadn't.

Lilia appointed herself his chaperone and flew to Moscow with him. All the way there, staring out the window at a thick deck of clouds below, Yuri found himself imagining his arrival at the photoshoot: they would take one look at him, shake their heads, and say _we thought we were getting the other skater, the glamorous one_.

"Lilia Mikhailovna?" he said. "Why do you think they want me for this?"

Lilia looked up from her knitting but didn't pause. She was making a scarf out of mohair and silk, the pattern so complex that there were more holes than fabric. Her metal needles were a whirlwind of aggressive clicking. Basically Lilia's approach to knitting was to intimidate the yarn until it jumped into tidy stitches. Like her approach to teaching ballet, it seemed to work.

"You're a fresh face," she said, as if it ought to have been obvious. "Isn't this meant to be their 'Young Russia' issue?"

Naturally the great Lilia Baranovskaya was completely unintimidated by _Vogue Russia_. She'd done her own spreads in America and England. Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Annie Leibovitz. The photographs hung in frames on the walls of the sitting room, transcendent.

"I guess," said Yuri.

"You're the future. I think you should take the attitude that they're lucky to have you."

Lilia Baranovskaya had spoken. She went back to her knitting.

***

Yuri was meant to share the cover with an up-and-coming young dancer from the Moscow State Academy of Choreography. Like him, she was seventeen.

He was just a little insulted by that. So she was his age, right, fine – but she was a ballet dancer, not a figure skater, which meant that at seventeen she was still a student. She was not even a member of a provincial _corps de ballet_ , while he was one of the best figure skaters in the world. Well, perhaps that was debatable, but he was certainly, unquestionably, with the medal to prove it, the best skater in Russia right now. Whatever that was worth.

Still, the girl seemed nice enough and really he didn't give a damn as long as they were paying him. He was prepared to put up with a lot for money, although two hours in the makeup chair was pushing it. He didn't have _that_ many spots, and after a while he was sure that they were just taking the piss. His eyelashes were just fine the way they were, thank you very much.

"It's fucking _objectification_ , that's what it is," he said to Lilia, spitting the word in English.

She looked quizzically at him, her knitting needles pausing for a moment.

"I don't know what that means," she said flatly.

Yuri shrugged. "It's just a thing people talk about online. It's stupid."

"English slang," said Lilia disapprovingly. "Say it in Russian."

The only thing she hated more than profanity in the mouths of her students was using English words when you were meant to be speaking Russian. (You couldn't say that she disapproved of profanity in general, Yuri had overheard her telling off Yakov while he was hanging a picture and she could swear like a sailor.) 

" _Obyektivatsiya_?" suggested Yuri tentatively.

"Ah," said Lilia. " _Opredmechivaniye. Oveshestvleniye._ "

"Maybe?"

"Just like political education sessions at the Bolshoi," she murmured to herself. "The objectification, reification and alienation of labour."

"Huh," said Yuri, hoping that he sounded like he had a clue what she was talking about, because he really didn't.

"You were reading about this online?" 

"Not voluntarily."

"I didn't read about it voluntarily either. If we're discussing the same thing, which I somehow doubt."

But they never got the chance to find out, because some minion came in to lead Yuri off to the slaughter.

***

It turned out that it was actually really hard to model for the cover of _Vogue_. Yuri had endured Victor's endless war stories about photoshoots, but he'd always assumed that Victor was exaggerating. It wasn't like he hadn't posed for photos before: he'd had profile pictures taken for the FSFR and things like that. How hard could it be to stand around for a couple of hours while some idiot stuck a lens in your face? 

Only the _Vogue_ photographer was nothing like the FSFR hacks; this guy thought he was an artist or something. The corrections started instantly. Yuri needed to stand on the other side of Alyona. The lighting didn't emphasise his cheekbones enough. There was a strand of hair falling into his face. His lips needed blotting, the gloss should have been more matte, what had the makeup artist been thinking? All that was before he started in on the way the two of them were posing, and the expressions on their faces.

"It's worse than morning class," whispered Alyona to Yuri in an undertone, tilting her head a little further towards Yuri as she had been asked.

"They're not paying me enough for this shit," whispered Yuri back.

In reply he could feel the shrug of her shoulderblade under his hand. It was weird having to stand so close to some girl he'd just met. If he'd gone into pairs skating he would have had to get used to it, but that wasn't his style. He was a lone wolf. No, a lone panther. And he...

"No, no!" shouted the photographer. "Look, Plisetsky, you can't just stand there like a prize heifer! I need some chemistry, some expression! Give me smoldering. Can you do that?"

He said it like Yakov might have said _I want to you to land a triple toe loop_ , like there was nothing so obvious in the world.

"Smoldering?" said Yuri. "What the fuck?"

The photographer let out a massive sigh. "All right. Is there someone you really hate, only you really sort of want to fuck them too? Imagine you're looking at them instead of the camera. Show them who's boss."

"Why didn't you just say so?"

This was the sort of artistic direction Yuri could get behind. He stared at the camera and set his jaw.

"Wow," said the photographer teasingly, "who is it?"

"Nobody!"

"Well, whatever it is you're thinking, keep thinking it. That's perfect."

It wasn't perfect. It was sick. Because he was thinking of Victor. After the guy had said _really hate_ , he hadn't been able to get him out of his mind.

(Never in a million years. Never, ever. Except maybe in a time travel alternate universe scenario, if aliens made them do it. But that would never happen, so he didn't have to worry about it.) 

"I don't want to fuck him," said Yuri quickly. "I just want to fuck him up."

The photographer made an approving noise. "I can work with that!" 

Alyona let out a little giggle; the shutter clicked and clicked.

***

That was the picture that ended up on the cover of _Vogue_ : Alyona caught just at the moment when her giggle had turned to a smirk, Yuri smoldering passionately at the camera. Beneath all the makeup and the postproduction, the two of them looked almost inhuman, their skin smoothed into icy paleness, disdainful of ordinary mortals. It didn't even look like they had _pores_ , for Christ's sake.

Yuri stole Lilia's copy from the table and stared at it privately in his room. _Do I really look like that?_ His eyebrows were heavier than he remembered them being, making him look even more intense, and his eyes looked very green. They must have gotten the lighting right because you could see the shadows in the hollows of his cheekbones. And he'd set his jaw so that it looked almost square. An arrogant, glamorous young man, not a boy, looked back at him. It was as if Yuri Plisetsky had been stolen away and replaced with a changeling. 

Maybe this was why some people thought that photography stole your soul. Maybe this was where Victor Nikiforov had come from, that weird space between the camera and the page.

Yuri shivered a little bit. Then he tore the magazine in two and used it to line Potya's litterbox.

***

A couple of weeks after that, his agent told him that Red Bull wanted him to be the face of their new ad campaign. They'd been so inspired by his viral video in the skate park from last year that they wanted to try to use it to sell sports drinks. Whatever. He thought he'd been drinking Coke that morning, but apparently that didn't matter.

What did matter was the amount of money they were offering him: the number she mentioned so casually nearly made his eyes pop out of his skull. It was about as much as he'd earned during the whole course of his career as a competitive skater.

It was so insane that, sitting in his room that evening, he couldn't resist calling Victor to brag.

Victor picked up the phone immediately. "Yura! It's amazing to hear from you! It's been so long!"

Bizarrely, he actually sounded happy to be talking to Yuri, like he'd forgotten entirely about their last conversation in a hotel lobby in Helsinki. Was that down to his insane self-belief or the fact that he had a memory like a goldfish? You could tell him that you would never speak to him again and hoped he'd die in a fire, and two months later he'd be convinced that you loved him and had just been really busy. Oh well.

"Guess what," said Yuri, cutting to the chase. "I got a sponsorship deal with Red Bull. You know that stupid viral video of me at the skate park in Moscow? They want to turn it into, like, a big international campaign and stuff. TV ads, billboards. Two years."

And then he named the figure. _Eat your heart out, Victor._ There was a short pause on the other end of the line.

"Wow!" said Victor. "Really? For an international campaign? You're kidding. I'd ask for twice that."

The record scratch in Yuri's head was probably audible across the whole breadth of Asia. "What?"

"Well, _I'd_ ask for twice that," Victor amended. "Maybe 50% more would be fair for you – after all you don't have the track record. But you should definitely start by asking them to double the number! There's no one else in the skating world who could do that campaign, with that aesthetic, and they know it. I certainly couldn't."

"Uh... yeah." What the fuck was he meant to say to that? Should he be insulted? Flattered? He had no idea. "Thanks?"

"Any time!" said Victor sunnily. "Send me the contract if you like. I can have a look at it for you."

"Sure."

He could feel the suspicion beginning to steal over him. Why did Victor want to see his contract anyway? Why was Victor being so nice to him? What was in it for him?

"So, how are things going?" Victor continued, like Yuri had just called to chat or something. "Enjoying some time off? Are you doing Yakov's summer camp this year?"

No, he wasn't going to do this. He couldn't possibly do this.

"I, uh..." He held the phone away from his face and addressed himself to Potya, who was lying at the bottom of his bed. "Yakov, I'm on the phone with Victor, I can't... OK, fine..."

Then he spoke back into the phone: "Sorry, that's Yakov. Look, I've got to go. Bye Victor!"

And he hung up before Victor could say goodbye. Potya gave him a disdainful glance and then went back to vigorously and earnestly licking her own asshole. He loved cats.

Yuri instructed his agent to go back to Red Bull and ask for twice what they'd offered him. For two nights running he woke up in the middle of the night feeling sick, thinking that he'd thrown everything away by listening to Victor's stupid king-of-the-world advice. Why hadn't he just grabbed the money that was right in front of him?

On the third day he had an email from his agent: they'd offered him 40% more than their starting figure, but this was their final offer. She advised him to take it.

He took it with no regrets.

***

Filming a TV ad was even stranger than doing a photoshoot. It was meant to be a recreation of his viral video, but it was at a brand new skate park in a part of Moscow where Yuri had never been. He wouldn't have put it past them to have had it built just for the filming. Even the graffiti was squeaky clean; they'd probably commissioned it from the sort of people who exhibited at the Erarta and Garage. None of the extras – beautiful people all – looked remotely like the loser _gopniks_ who hung around in Lyubertsy.

 _What do they even need me here for?_ Yuri found himself wondering. But he was the star.

He was very glad that Ilya was there. He'd insisted that they hire him as one of the extras; Ilya had got special permission to take a day off from his hotel manager training.

"This is so fucking weird," said Ilya to Yuri, _sotto voce_.

"This is the weirdest thing I've ever done," said Yuri – and that was saying a lot.

They had video cameras all over; there was even a drone buzzing around, which was incredibly distracting until you got used to it. Thankfully the director didn't seem to care too much about Yuri's expression on the skateboard, but he still wanted every shot just perfect. It took most of the day, take after take after take of the same stupid jumps that had taken about three minutes back in Lyubertsy. It might not have been skating, but it was still exhausting. The whole crew had to hang around waiting while Yuri stood doubled over in the middle of the skate park, his hands resting on his knees, gasping desperately for air.

And with every new take, no matter how ragged, the extras had to stand in the background and gasp and cheer like they'd never seen anything so amazing in their lives. To be fair, at the beginning of the day, they probably hadn't.

"Come on, people," said the director wearily. "Pretend you haven't seen it before. It's called acting."

(Privately, Yuri thought that the director should have just hired some of the Yuri's Angels for the job. His own fans wouldn't get tired of watching him, would they? There was a knot of them just outside the gate, being kept back by security. They would be so much better than some random pretty actors.)

"If you think this is so boring," said Yuri, addressing the crowd of extras at random, "you can come and try doing it yourself."

From a folding chair at the side, Lilia made a warning noise.

Yuri sighed and went back to work. Weren't there child labor laws or something? This was economic exploitation. The objectification, reification and alienation of labour, he remembered Lilia saying. Maybe he ought to read some Marx after all.

***

At the end of the ad, one of his slow motion spin jumps off the skateboard was meant to transition to a shot of him landing a perfect quad toe loop on the ice. Filming _that_ at some random rink had also taken several hours – which was embarassing.

The director might have been happy enough with one of his earlier attempts, but Yuri kept skating over to look at the playback and realising exactly how crap his landings were. They could do whatever they wanted with his eyebrows, but there was no way he was going to be broadcast all over the world dragging a scratchy toe pick across the ice like that. Then other takes that he'd thought were great, it would turn out the lighting had been wrong or the sound had been muffled or something that he wouldn't have noticed at all.

All that hassle must have been worth it, because the finished commercial looked amazing. Every move perfect, smooth, seamlessly cut together. If he hadn't remembered how much agony the filming had been, it would have looked effortless even to him. His quad toe loop – the part he really cared about – was like the platonic ideal of quad toe loops. He really needed these guys to edit his competition skates. Then he wouldn't have anything to worry about.

The slogan for the ad was "Do you," in English. To Yuri it sounded like an invitation to jerk off, but whatever – English was weird. Apparently the message was supposed to be something about going your own way, not giving a fuck what other people thought of you, even if that meant doing figure skating jumps off a skateboard. It was the exact opposite of the impulse that had made him show off in the skate park in the first place – because he did care, very much, what people thought of him. He would just rather die than admit it.

He wondered whether that _gopnik_ from the skate park would ever see the ad campaign. How could he not? It was all over TV, it was plastered on billboards all around the MKAD in Moscow, you couldn't possibly leave Lyubersy without seeing it. Maybe he never left Lyubertsy. Still.

***

Yuri used some of the money from the campaign to buy his grandad a car. He was sad to see the old Lada go – it was older than he was – but it had been long ready for the scrapyard. The body was so rusted out that you could actually see the highway going past through a little hole in the floor on the passenger side.

Anyone who followed Russian skating at all had heard the story of how Victor had bought Yakov a Mercedes after he won silver at his first Olympics. _The love of a student for his coach_ and all that bullshit. Yakov still drove the Mercedes, even after the incident a few years ago when some asshole had keyed it while he was visiting Yuri's grandad in Lubertsy. (It had needed a whole new paint job and, excruciatingly, the story had made the local papers). So Yakov didn't need another car – and anyway, it would only have looked like Yuri was copying Victor.

He wanted to buy his grandad a Mercedes, and he could have afforded it if he'd spent all his Red Bull money on it, but his grandad said that he would just feel like someone else's chauffeur. He wanted a Hyundai Solaris with heated seats, so that was what Yuri got him.

He was so proud, almost prouder than when he'd won the Grand Prix Final.

***

**Summer 2017**

Yuri spent three weeks at Yakov's summer camp in the Dolomites, like he had done every summer since he was seven. Ten years now.

This year was a little bit special because he was going to be allowed, under supervision, to help out as a very junior assistant coach. All of the skaters at Yubileyny Sport Club had to study sport science and get their basic qualifications, and so that's what he'd done. He couldn't imagine himself actually coaching like Yakov someday, but he liked the idea of getting to tell other people what to do for a change. Besides, it was almost like having a real job: he was paying his own room and board (previously subsidized by Yubileyny), and he even got spending money. It was sort of cool.

All the kids looked so nervous as they got off the minibuses from the airport. Yuri just leaned against the wall of the rink, breathing in the fresh air and looking up at the mountains above the town, thinking how great it was not to be the youngest and least experienced anymore. By this point he knew Yakov's little welcoming speech by heart – _my expectations are high, blah blah blah_ – and he only really tuned in again when he heard his own name.

"...and Yuri Plisetsky, who's with us as an assistant coach this year."

Most of the kids were staring at him wide-eyed. One of the older boys folded his arms and raised his chin a little.

"Uh, hi," said Yuri, realizing belatedly that he ought to have come up with something to say in advance. "Welcome to camp. I'm coaching jumps. You're going to have to work hard and like, pay attention and listen to me. But it's going to be a lot of fun too."

Where the hell had that come from? Who had just spoken those words? Yuri Nikolaievich Plisetsky, noted screw-up and annual winner by popular vote of the Yubileyny Sport Club's 'bad attitude on ice' award? Surely not.

Yakov was nodding approvingly, but most of the kids still looked terrified. So they should. Apparently his reputation had preceded him.

***

Yuri spent most of the day training with the other kids. His main responsibility was helping out with the older kids' off-ice jump practice at ten thirty every morning. There were eight of them, all aged between nine and fifteen. Most of them were trying to jump doubles and triples, though whether you could dignify the attempts with the name was debatable. His job was to watch them taking turns at their jumps, correct their technique, encourage them to keep trying even if they fell over, and – occasionally, without showing off – show them how it was meant to be done.

It was so boring. Off-ice training was always boring, but it was even worse when you had to stand around watching other people doing it. On the positive side, he could yell at them for doing things wrong, instead of being yelled at himself. It was a refreshing change. Or it would have been, if it weren't for Romain.

Romain Petit was fourteen, French, insufferable. He was the kid who'd folded his arms when he was first introduced to Yuri, and he was the best skater in the group. He was short for his age, long-limbed and very skinny. If he'd been in a choir he would still have been singing soprano. He could just about jump quads, at least on the floor – and as far as he was concerned, spending time on anything else was a waste.

When Yuri was correcting the other kids, Romain was always at the back somewhere, messing around on a balance board or hopping up and down, pursuing his own self-appointed training regimen.

"Romain!" snapped Yuri for the hundredth time that day. "Pay attention, I'm explaining something! Now, Katarina, when you bring your leg around you need to..."

"I already know how to do that," said Romain sulkily.

"A, no you don't, and B, I don't care. So anyway..."

Romain tried again. "Why don't we..."

"Why don't you shut up before – "

What Yuri wanted to say was, _before I take the laces out of your skates and garrotte you with them_ , but it was probably a violation of the Code of Conduct for Coaches or something. He had a feeling it was; he'd had to pass an exam on it. Also he didn't know how to say _garrotte_ in English.

" – before I get really annoyed," he finished lamely.

Romain just smirked at him.

"Look, watch." Yuri wound up and launched himself into, if he did say so himself, the perfect off-ice triple salchow. "Like that. If you can't do it like that, don't argue with me."

Most of the kids looked a little afraid, which wasn't exactly what he wanted, but he couldn't think of any other way of showing them who was boss.

Romain Petit just rolled his eyes.

***

That evening, after dinner, Yakov took Yuri for a stroll to have a talk about how the coaching was going. It was just before sunset, and pink clouds streamed from the summits of the mountains above them. It was spectacular. Yuri didn't care. He launched right into complaining about Romain.

"He's such a smartass! He doesn't listen to a word I say! I'm going to murder him!"

"You're not going to murder him," said Yakov with an edge of amusement. "First, you know that it would reflect badly on the Yakov Feltsman Summer Camp. Second, you know that you wouldn't fare well in prison."

"Whatever." Yuri didn't want to think about that. "So what am I supposed to do then? He doesn't fucking listen. He thinks he knows everything already."

"Now you know how hard it is being a coach. Most of your students are underconfident. Some of them are overconfident. And a special few are both at once." Yuri didn't like the way that Yakov looked at him when he said that. "You can't make anyone listen, however much you shout at them. You need to make them _want_ to listen. It took me a long time to learn that!"

Yuri thought that Yakov was still learning it, but this didn't seem like it would be a useful observation. Yakov would probably just shout at him if he said so.

"How do I do that?"

"To start off, you need to understand him."

"What's to understand? I don't get it. What did I ever do to him? I barely even know him!"

"Don't you remember how you felt about... older, better skaters when you were his age?"

The pause said it all. Yakov could just have said _Victor_ and been done with it.

"Yeah, but that's different! I mean, that was Victor, and I... I'm nothing like him."

He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as he said that.

"For Romain you are," said Yakov. "You're everything he wants to be, and is afraid of not being."

"Fuck," said Yuri. "No wonder he hates me."

Yakov shrugged. For a while they toiled together uphill, along the little path that they'd chosen. Yakov was puffing a little bit, wiping at his forehead with his handkerchief. Yuri wasn't out of breath – _obviously_ – but he was feeling a little sore from training and he was grateful for the excuse to slow down. Because he was so considerate of Yakov.

At the top of the hill there was a little bench where you could sit and enjoy the view over the town and the mountains beyond. Yakov plopped down on it right away; Yuri stood for a little while, just to make the point that he wasn't tired, and then sat down.

"Maybe," tried Yuri, "I could help with the little kids instead?"

"You, Yura? Little children?"

"What, you think I'd make them cry or something? I'm not that much of an asshole!" 

There was a pause. Yakov looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

"I'm not that _kind_ of an asshole," Yuri amended. "I like kids."

Yakov made a sort of a grumble. "Do you not think you're capable of working with the older children?"

"Of course I think I'm capable," protested Yuri, "I just don't want to accidentally call Romain a dickhead."

"Doesn't it help you sympathize if you think of him as a younger version of you?"

"No! I was totally a dickhead when I was fourteen. I would have deserved it."

Yakov nodded in rueful agreement. "Well, I have faith in you anyway," he said.

Yuri hated it when Yakov had faith in him. The only thing worse was when he didn't.

"I'll let you try helping with my novice on-ice class," said Yakov finally. "We'll see how you do with that. But I want you to keep on teaching the off-ice jump practice too. It will be good for you."

"OK," said Yuri, feeling a little bit sulky. His whole life was full of things that were meant to be good for him: buckwheat, the _banya_ , going to bed at 9pm, core exercises, _barre_ work, learning which fork to use, teaching little assholes who didn't want to be taught. So much goodness that you would think his life would be perfect by now. Fat chance.

"And Yuri? If I ever hear that you've called him 'little Romain,' whether to his face or behind his back, you'll never coach for me again! Understood?"

Yuri hadn't even thought of that. Of course - _Romain Petit_. He burst out laughing.

Yakov gave him a pat on the back and chuckled a little bit himself, like he'd just used the warning as an excuse to make the joke. Then he groaned and hauled himself to his feet.

"Right, we'd better get back," he said. "Lights out at nine thirty."

***

Yuri loved watching the little kids having their group class with Yakov. They looked like they were having so much fun. They did their little hops and practiced their edges by being dragged around in circles by Yakov at the end of a streamer, and they followed him around like a flock of baby ducklings. Meanwhile Yuri was busy fighting with his cantilever over at the other side of the rink, casting envious glances in their direction.

"Yura!" shouted Yakov. "Over here! You want to demonstrate what power and ice coverage look like?"

It took him a second to realise that for once Yakov wasn't telling him off for his cantilever. He skated over to the group. "Sure. What do you want?"

Before he knew it Yakov was putting one end of the cloth streamer ceremoniously into his hand. "You, Yura, are going to tow me around the rink now. Show them how it's done. Put your back into it."

Yuri grabbed the streamer and started pulling. He remembered having done this with Yakov back when he'd first come to the camp. The weird thing was that it seemed nearly as hard now as it had then. Maybe his standards were higher.

"You're fucking heavy, Yakov," he complained over his shoulder. "You need to do something about that."

But this was a matter of pride. He dug in like his technical scores depended on it and gave Yakov the quickest tour of the rink that he'd probably done in the past twenty years. When he took the final corner, he pivoted, dropped the streamer and let Yakov go sailing off in a graceful curve. Getting into the act, Yakov gave them a small arabesque. The kids applauded.

"And that," said Yakov, "is how you do that. Now you lucky boys and girls are going to take turns with Yuri."

"You mean I have to pull _them_ all around too?" exclaimed Yuri, making a face so expressive it practically belonged in an exhibition skate. "Yakov, you're a slavedriver!"

A little ripple of giggles was his reward for that. He probably could have pulled them all at once, trailing behind him like beads on a string, but – as Yuri knew full well – Yakov had meant it the other way around.

It was the best training exercise he'd done in ages, standing there while these kids fought with every last ounce of their strength just to pull him around the rink. To be honest he was making it difficult on purpose – he had to dig in a little bit, he was nowhere near as heavy as Yakov. And hell was it fun.

"Go on, pull!" he shouted, laughing hysterically. "Harder, harder!" 

He loved the little kids. They were very straightforward. If you told them they'd done something badly, they tried to do it better next time; if you told them they'd done something well, they were happy. They admired him (as they should) but they weren't weird about it. There wasn't anything egotistical about them. It was refreshing.

He'd been like that once, hadn't he? He'd actually enjoyed skating once, hadn't he? Maybe he ought to learn a lesson from them or something.

***

Yuri had his height and weight and body fat measured every week at camp, just like he did at home. In what seemed like a small miracle, he'd finally stopped growing: the number had been stuck at 178 centimeters for months now. By way of a change, he'd started putting on muscle instead.

A couple years ago he could have lifted weights all he liked and his arms still would have had the approximate circumference of noodles. Now, he could easily rack up reps with weights that he'd once struggled to hoist at all, and his arms were looking... a little bit less like noodles. He'd never be in any danger of being musclebound, as the world reckoned it – or even of looking like Victor, who did more weight training than he strictly needed. (Yakov never stopped grumbling about it.)

Nonetheless Yuri was getting stronger – and he could feel it in his skating. 

His flexibility had gone to shit, but that wasn't exactly new, and no one could expect to stay as flexible as they had been at fifteen anyway. He'd known that even then. Now found himself spending a lot of time on the turntable, having to relearn the art of contorting himself gracefully into the multiple positions required for a level 4 spin. His Biellman was... still possible, just, but he refused to demean himself by doing the sort of awkward, embarassingly squared-off renditions that Victor had inflicted on the world into his early twenties before finally giving up. Unlike some, he still had his pride.

He'd been a great jumper very young. He'd had his triple axel at eleven and had landed that quad – even if he'd two-footed it – in juniors at thirteen. He'd been little and light and it had all seemed simple and straightforward to him then.

It wasn't so simple now, as he'd been lamenting over the past two years, but it was starting to seem like being tall and strong might have some compensations. In his second week at camp, in off-ice training, he actually managed to best Victor's vertical leap – a Yubileyny Sport Club record and, knowing Victor, probably some sort of figure skater world record too. And he had only been messing around at the time! Afterwards, he was so suspicious that he investigated the measuring thing, wondering if it had been set up wrong or something. Everything seemed all right though; apparently he really could jump that high.

Next morning, he sat down across from Yakov at the coaches' table at breakfast. Yakov looked distinctly undercaffeinated and he was staring unhappily at an untouched bowl of muesli. Usually Yuri wouldn't risk a serious conversation at this hour, but he had an important question.

"Hey Yakov, we're a long way above sea level, right?"

"He asks me this at seven am!" announced Yakov to the room at large. Clearly it was one of those mornings. "Did the Sport Club not hire a tutor at great expense last year to attempt to teach you geography?!"

"And they pay _you_ to teach me quad flips..." mumbled Yuri under his breath.

Thankfully Yakov was already too worked up to have caught this. "Yes, Yura, the Italian Alps are a long way above sea level! Unlike Saint Petersburg!"

"So, like, is it easier to jump here? Because we're higher up?"

Yakov spluttered something incoherent about sports science qualifications and the effects of altitude on athletes (in general) and Yuri's brain (in particular).

"No, I know all that about red blood cells, but I just thought, you know, because there's less air resistance..." 

All Yakov's red blood cells were rushing to his face, which was not a good sign and probably meant that Yuri's theory was wrong. Time for a quick change of tack. 

"Never mind. Are you going to eat that muesli? If you don't want it, I'll eat it for you."

Wordlessly, Yakov held out the bowl with both hands, and Yuri grabbed it before it occurred to Yakov to dump it over his head. Then Yakov buried his face in his hands.

"Never again," he said fervently, "am I going to hold a summer camp anywhere that doesn't serve decent _kasha_. Altitude be damned."

Yuri made his escape with the muesli and sat down, a few tables away, at the first empty seat he could find. He had to think about this. If it wasn't down to the effects of altitude, then could it be that his jumping was actually improving? He was so excited about this prospect, and so hungry, that it wasn't till he finished his muesli that he realized he was sitting across the table from Little Romain.

" _I_ think," he was saying to the girl next to him, "that muesli in the morning just weighs your stomach down."

***

Victor turned up in time for the final week of the summer camp, swanning in late as always. He wasn't even there to train, not really – although Yuri noted that a couple of late-night slots had been blocked off for private sessions with Yakov. He was there because Yuri had hired him to do the choreography for his free program.

"You asked _Victor_ to be your choreographer?" Otabek had disbelievingly said on Skype when Yuri told him. "I thought you hated him."

"Of course I hate him," said Yuri. "But he's the best. How can I beat him if I don't have the best?"

Having to spend €15,000 of his endorsement money on Victor's choreography, which came expensive these days even with the 'friends and family' discount, had galled him beyond belief – but he would be damned if he was going to go through an Olympic season with commentators wittering on about his old-school choreography.

It was worth it, that was what he told himself. Probably worth it. Could be worth it.

Watching Victor climbing out of the convertible that he'd apparently driven all the way from the airport in Milan while blasting the greatest hits of Queen, Yuri downgraded his assessment of the deal to _better be fucking worth it_. Even in a few short months, he'd forgotten about the reality-bending field that seemed to kick into existence whenever Victor Nikiforov arrived on the scene. Here they were at a camp for elite figure skaters, surrounded by elite figure skaters (including, lest anyone forget, Yuri Plisetsky), and people were still running for autographs and selfies like they had no shame. Yuri saw Little Romain actually push another boy out of the way.

Yuri nearly walked away in disgust before remembering that he had brought this ungodly visitation upon them. He would publicly take responsibility where responsibility was due.

So he strolled casually into the little parking lot, gravel crunching under his feet, pushing his sunglasses up on top of his head. (He wasn't copying Victor. He really wasn't. It was just bright in Italy, that was all.)

"Hey asshole," he said. People's heads turned at that. "I have ice time booked for us in fifteen minutes, you know."

"I know," said Victor. "That's why I risked speeding tickets to get here in time!"

"Do you have my choreography?"

Victor tapped his big forehead with one finger. "All in here. By the way, Yura, I really like those sunglasses. Did you get them in Milan?"

***

By the time he finally hauled Victor away from his admirers and got him warmed up and onto the rink, they were ten minutes into his ice time already. Typical.

Yuri crossed his arms and shook out his right ankle, which had been a little stiff recently. "Well? Hit me with it. What's my free program?"

"Bohemian Rhapsody," said Victor. 

He looked at Yuri expectantly, like he thought he deserved more of a reaction than he was getting.

"It's kind of old, isn't it?" said Yuri cautiously. "It's practically a classic."

"Deservedly a classic."

"Also, weren't you listening to Queen in the car? If I find out you threw together my choreography on the way from Malpensa, I'm going to kill you."

It would have been just like Victor to have decided on a piece because someone had left behind a random CD in the rental car.

"Yura, I have been living and breathing your choreography for weeks. Just ask Yuuri: I've thought of nothing else!" He did a little two-foot spin as if to emphasise the point. "It's the perfect piece for you. It's modern, it tells a story. It has contrasts: it's lyrical, it's classical, it's angry, it's funny, it's poignant. It has electric guitar too! You can pour all your passion and all your anger into it and still have room to spare."

"I don't have that much anger," said Yuri sullenly.

Victor let out a little laugh. "Well, then, you're going to have to act! Do you want to see it?"

 _I paid for this,_ Yuri reminded himself. _He's giving me what I asked him for._

"Sure," he said. "Show me."

After a few more preparatory turns around the rink, Victor took his starting position and cued Yuri for the music. Then he launched into it.

It was the first time that Yuri had seen Victor skating since his injury at Rostelecom, nine months before. Enough time to create a whole new person. He knew that he ought to be concentrating on the choreography, but he couldn't help watching Victor instead, unconsciously holding his breath with every new element. Half of him was longing for Victor's mask to slip, revealing him broken and human still – the other half was terrified that it would.

Victor marked the whole program, as he often did when he was choreographing – but he marked it with singles, and there was nothing lacking in their height or power. Making allowances for the fact that it was the middle of the off season, his transitions were fluid, if occasionally a little more gingerly executed than usual. His ice coverage was extravagant, superb as always. If you hadn't shared a rink with Victor Nikiforov at the height of his powers, you would never have guessed that this was a man still recovering from spinal surgery.

After extricating himself from the closing pose, Victor got to his feet. Sweat was darkening the neckline of his T-shirt.

"There," he said, smiling a weary, self-satisfied smile. "What do you think?"

Yuri had to bite back an observation on Victor's skating, reminding himself that he was meant to be commenting the choreography. He couldn't remember a thing about the choreography.

"Can you, uh, run it for me again? There was a lot to take in." 

Victor sighed, ran a hand through sweaty hair. "Yura, I want you to remember that I just spent the last three hours crammed into an Alfa Romeo driving mountain roads. I'm not superhuman, you know."

"You could have fooled me," said Yuri dryly. "Also, you could have afforded a chauffeur."

"Flattery," said Victor, "will get you almost everywhere. But still..."

"Look, why don't you just skate it like you're a choreographer? You're not competing; you don't _have_ to take up the whole rink."

"I guess not," said Victor reluctantly, like the idea had never occurred to him before. "But it wouldn't have the same impact..."

How much fucking ego did this man have? "Just show me again, OK? I'll imagine the impact."

So Victor, grumbling the way Yakov grumbled when someone forced him into demonstrating a toe loop, went back to the beginning. This time, Yuri forced himself to pay attention to the choreography.

It was, as he realized now, a program that demanded attention. It was wall-to-wall level 4 elements, like Victor was trying to bait the ISU into creating a level 5 just for him and Yuri. The difficulty of the jump entries was insane and the spins were pure metal. (Victor was clearly indulging his Stéphane Lambiel fanboy tendencies again.)

It was a program on which you could crash and burn, or triumph. There was no middle ground.

"Insert quad axel here, if available," said Victor wryly after jumping the single, gliding to a halt halfway through the program while the music crashed on. "I've left you room for one."

"Oh, fuck _off_ Victor. Why are you stopping?"

Victor smiled sunnily. "I'm tired!"

His manner was so easy, and this was so much like old times, that it was difficult to remember that Victor was now the enemy. He was such an amazing actor, and so shameless about it, that he just carried you along. _All good friends here, nothing to see._

"You are such a fucking old man," said Yuri. "You know they don't have breaks for naptime at the Olympics?"

An edge of seriousness entered Victor's expression, a rueful twist of the lip. "Yes, I do know. I've competed in three Olympics already."

 _Oh fuck._ Of course he had, and of course he was planning to go back for a fourth. 

Lost in the petty joys of making fun of Victor's age, Yuri had forgotten exactly how high the stakes were. God help him, he had actually been enjoying himself – feeling for once in his life like Victor was actually thinking a little bit about him, not just about himself.

And he knew why that was: because he'd bought Victor's time and attention for the week. Because Victor, underneath the artfully floppy hair and the airheaded smiles, was a consummate professional.

 _Victor is such a whore,_ thought Yuri bitterly. _You can even pay him to be nice to you._

But he found that didn't want to believe that – and it wasn't for Victor's sake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lilia's history with _Vogue_ is somewhat inspired by [Maya Plisetskaya's](http://www.danzaballetblog.com/2017/08/maya-plisetskaya-by-richard-avedon.html), although Lilia's own photoshoot with Richard Avedon would have been a couple of decades later.
> 
> Yuri's _Vogue Russia_ cover is inspired by [this one](http://melmoth.blog/post/165238853258/vaganova-ballet-academy-student-kirill) with Kirill Sokolovsky, a Vaganova Ballet Academy student. Yuri, of course, smolders more and has less stringy hair.
> 
> Skaters definitely seem to buy cars for their coaches. Yagudin bought Tatiana Tarasova a Lexus – and she [had some misadventures](https://ptichkafs.livejournal.com/33094.html) that inspired Yakov's.
> 
> Yakov's summer camp is modeled on Alexei Mishin's: [ here's an interesting report](http://www.absoluteskating.com/index.php?cat=articles&id=2011mishingachinski</a) and here's Mishin [teaching a group lesson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM0f5hy0_ho) at the camp (skip to 4:40).
> 
> Off-ice jump training [looks like this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R0or5eDLsQ). (As taught by Plushenko.)
> 
> Finally I'd like to thank the inhabitants of "A Language Learner's Forum" for reassuring me that my forays into Russian translation were not completely wide of the mark.


	9. Chapter 9

**Autumn 2017**

Something had broken in Victor, something other than his back. Yuri knew it. 

Once upon a time he'd thought that Victor would never keep skating after Katsuki retired, that Katsuki had been the driving force behind Victor's sudden return to the ice. (That embrace at the Grand Prix Final. Victor's hair falling against his face.) 

He didn't think he'd been wrong either. That injury had changed things. Victor would have been perfectly happy to retire on his own terms, but when he landed wrong that day in October, something had cracked, something that couldn't be fixed with pins and screws. There had always been the rattle of something loose inside him, and now you could hear it with every breath, every movement. Yuri felt like he should have known it would come to this.

Victor was allegedly making his own preparations for the coming season. Rather than coming back to Piter – and to Yakov – like any sensible person would have done, he'd decided to stay in Hasetsu and have Katsuki coach him. Yuri heard this straight from Yakov, who elected to inform the whole Yubileyny rink at full volume.

"Huh," said Yuri with quiet disdain. "Like _that's_ going to work."

On the one hand, he was thrilled to hear that Victor would be staying nearly a full continent away from him. On the other hand, he would have dropped everything and flown to Hasetsu again to beg Katsuki to coach him too, if he'd thought there was the slightest chance that Katsuki would say yes. But Katsuki had eyes only for Victor, and Victor had eyes only for himself. They deserved each other.

And that left Yuri in Piter, with Yakov, as the chilly days of autumn began to shorten into winter and the competition season neared.

***

Day by day, as Victor's choreography seeped into his muscles, Yuri became convinced that it was either a blessing or a curse. There was nothing in it of the commercial transaction. Every impossible transition, every combination spin that asked him to contort his body to its limits, carried behind it the weight of Victor's expectations, that half-mocking, unreadable smile.

_I believed that you could pull that off. Can you? Or was I wrong? I created a program that could win gold. Are you worthy of it?_

This program felt like nothing he'd skated before. Agape had been one of Victor's castoffs, his own before it was Yuri's, never more than an ill-fitting hand-me-down. While Katsuki had owned Eros body and soul – _made it his bitch,_ thought Yuri with satisfaction – all he'd managed to bring to Agape was his youth and flexibility, things that any fifteen-year-old could have brought. Nothing about himself.

Everything that Lilia had choreographed for him was beautiful, of course. Lilia was incapable of creating anything that wasn't beautiful. But she wasn't a figure skater, and her choreography came filtered through Yakov's technical amendments. She didn't always know what was possible and impossible on the ice; if left to her own devices, she would kill him trying to be something that he could never be. Yakov could make a program skatable, and he could make it score well, but there was always an awkward join between his work and Lilia's, where aesthetics met the cold realities of sport.

With Victor there was nothing like that. Victor could please the judges as instinctively as breathing; with every figure that he scribed onto the ice, his body arched and curved against the limits of the impossible, as if it were his lover. He knew, without even having to think, exactly how far he could push before pleasure became pain, before you faltered on the brink of the precipice. His choreography dripped with the belief that if you pushed just a little harder, just a little further, the bounds of the possible could be transcended for an instant – but only an instant. It never asked more than that.

And Victor knew Yuri well. Too well.

As Yuri became more and more familiar with Victor's choreography, he started to wonder what it was actually meant to say. While working with Yuri at the summer camp, Victor had been too busy walking Yuri through the execution to say much about the thought behind it. And it had never occurred to Yuri to ask.

" _Let me go,_ " he now remembered Victor saying. "Always make sure you're facing the judges for this part. Imagine they're thundering away at you and you're going to _make_ them put you on the top step of the podium. Really stamp your feet on the step sequence. Give them a temper tantrum. Beelzebub has a devil put aside for you, after all."

Then he had gone through the step sequence, which was an uncanny simulacrum of Yuri himself at about eight. Or maybe thirteen.

"I never had tantrums like that!" burst out Yuri.

"I never said that you did," Victor had said, putting one finger to his lips with a seraphic smile.

But he had skated it; he hadn't needed to say more.

Now that Yuri was living and breathing Bohemian Rhapsody on the ice, he started thinking about what it actually meant. Taking in English lyrics while learning new choreography had been beyond him, but now he printed them off from the internet and sat down to study them. He even took them to his English tutor, hoping for some distraction from the stupid, pointless Unified State Exam. She wasn't interested, which meant that he was thrown back on his own resources.

"It's not even all in English," he complained to Otabek over Skype. " _Bismillah,_ what does that even mean?"

" _In the name of God,_ " said Otabek without any hesitation. "It's the first word in every chapter of the Quran. It's like a prayer."

"Oh." Yuri felt so stupid. He hated feeling stupid. "Right."

Otabek laughed. "That's as far as I get with the Quran."

 _Bismillah_ aside, the language was really not too difficult. And the more he studied it, the more he skated to it, the more he wondered whether Victor had intended the program to be about him. _He's just a poor boy from a poor family._ The lines echoed in his head. Perhaps Victor had been amused by the idea of making him skate to a cruel joke at his own expense.

He'd paid enough for the choreography. If he'd wanted, he could have called Victor; he had a right, a contractual right, to ask for changes and adjustments. He certainly had a right to complain. But what would he have said? _Is this what you really think of me, Victor?_

 _Easy come, easy go._ Whatever Victor had intended, it was his choreography now and he would make it his own. More than that, he would make it take him all the way to the Olympics. That would, after all, be the ultimate revenge.

As the days shortened, the darkness outside the rink closed in. It was dark when he arrived, dark when he left, lit only by the harsh glare of the artificial lights against the white ice. It was like a spotlight, slowly narrowing in on him alone. There was no one else now: no Victor, no Georgi, none of the older generation of skaters who had filled the rink when he'd first arrived at Yubileyny. There was just Yuri Plisetsky and the ice.

And every time he glanced at Eurosport, in the upper right corner of the screen, there was the pitiless countdown of the days left to Pyeongchang.

***

One Sunday morning in early October, Lilia and Yakov left the apartment very early without telling him where they were going. He didn't care. It was probably some boring old person thing, like Lilia was taking Yakov for a colonoscopy or something. 

With the place to himself, Yuri stretched out on the couch, Potya lying warm and smug on his stomach. He cranked up some punk rock on Lilia's sacred stereo system, as loud as it would go. After having been forced to listen to Queen all week, this was exactly what he needed to exorcise it from his head, but Potya's ears twitched and she looked at him unhappily. He sighed and turned down the stereo again; he couldn't get away with anything.

He lay there all morning scrolling through stuff on his phone until his stomach started rumbling and he had to get up and forage in the fridge for leftovers. This was ridiculous. Where were they, anyway? He peeked out the window and saw nothing but the fog.

It wasn't until mid afternoon that he heard the key in the lock. There was a faint giggle in the hall outside. The two of them came into the sitting room hand in hand, glancing at one other as if they'd just gotten away with something.

"Where have you been all day?" demanded Yuri. He felt weirdly like he was the adult and Yakov and Lilia were the teenagers.

"Standing in line at ZAGS," said Yakov gruffly. "Until brunch, anyway."

"We got our license," said Lilia. She was smiling; she sounded a little tipsy. "We're getting married in a month."

"Remarried," corrected Yakov.

"You're what?" said Yuri.

It had never occurred to him that this would happen. They were already living together, weren't they? They were sharing Lilia's bedroom now. They were – God help him, it wasn't like there was any doubt – fucking. They'd _been_ married already. What was this meant to add?

"You're meant to say _congratulations on your engagement,_ " said Lilia primly, failing to mask the giddiness beneath her words.

"Congratulations on your engagement," said Yuri, because he knew by now that when Lilia told him how he was meant to behave, he had better listen. "I hope you'll be very happy together."

"We are," said Yakov firmly. "We also want you to be one of the witnesses."

"Oh god," said Yuri. "Really? Again?"

***

It was, they claimed, going to be a small, simple wedding. Just a trip to the registry office and then dinner in a restaurant with a few friends. No fuss, nothing to distract from them from preparations for the competition season. (They didn't actually say _not like that whole Katsuki-Nikiforov thing,_ but then they didn't need to.)

While it might have been simple, it certainly didn't end up being small. On that blustery November morning outside the registry office on the banks of the Neva, the sidewalk was crowded with guests waiting to go inside: Yakov's brother and his family from Tel Aviv, some of Lilia's cousins, her brunch-and-gallery-going friends (just like a Russian _Sex and the City,_ thought Yuri), and a lot of people from the Sport Club. A whole flock of ballet dancers from across the world were there too, recognisable by their perfect posture, chattering away in a dozen languages.

Perhaps unsurprisingly there was no sign of Sergei Lisitsyn – but Victor and Katsuki had flown all the way in from Japan. Victor was leaning against the stone wall of the embankment, his arm around Katsuki's shoulder, nodding vigorously while Tamara Trusova instructed him about something or other at full volume. It looked like he couldn't get a word in edgewise, which served him right.

It was so strange to see them back in Piter; Yuri had gotten used to having Victor a whole continent away, a spectre haunting his imagination rather than his waking life. He could see that Katsuki was casting occasional, nervous glances in his direction, but he couldn't bear the thought of going over to say hello.

It wouldn't be the same as it had been in the Dolomites, when it had been all about his choreography, when Yuri had been paying Victor to be his friend. No doubt Victor would pretend that everything was perfectly normal, like he always did, smooth everything over with charm. It made Yuri want to scream, just thinking about it, that contrast between the pretense and the horror that no one was acknowledging. He knew he wouldn't be able to stand it. Something would snap.

So he sidled as inconspicuously as he could away from Victor in the crowd, finding something else to occupy him whenever he got too close.

One small if surprising consolation was that Yakov hadn't asked Victor to be the second witness at the wedding. That honor went to a very elderly man – ninety if he was a day – who climbed gingerly out of a taxi outside the registry office, balancing on his cane as if he might break in half if he moved too quickly. By the time he had hauled himself upright, or as close as he could manage, Yakov was at his side, hugging him and kissing him warmly on both cheeks.

"Yura," said Yakov, beckoning him over. "This is Oleg Petrovich. You must look after him carefully today. He was _my_ coach, once upon a time."

Yuri studied the man. He was bent and worn, drooping skin almost hiding his eyes. It was impossible to imagine him sitting in a Kiss and Cry with his arm around Yakov – Yakov! – telling him that he had skated well but his double axel needed work.

"I would have won gold in Lake Placid," said Yuri by way of introduction.

Oleg Petrovich laughed. "I'm sure you would. Seventeen years old and jumping quad salchows? They would have thought that we had grown you in a laboratory somewhere."

Yuri shrugged modestly. It was easy to be modest when your quad salchow was – currently – shit. But this guy was an utter fossil. Back when he'd skated competitively, they'd probably still been going out on frozen lakes and strapping bones to their feet.

"Notwithstanding that," Oleg added, "your edgework is sloppy and it would never have passed muster in the days of compulsory figures."

 _Well, fuck that._ "Tell Yakov."

"I have. He doesn't listen, of course; he never did listen. I told him not to marry Lilia the first time around. You see how much good that did."

It was time for them to go into the registry office. Yuri had to give the old man his arm just to get him up the front steps; though he was leaning heavily on Yuri, he was so frail that it felt like nothing at all. They ended up crowded into a hallway waiting for the previous ceremony to finish. Luckily there were a few chairs lined up by the wall. The old man sat down with a huff of effort. Then he looked up at Yuri, his hands crossed over his cane.

"Yakov tells me that he has you to thank for his remarriage."

This idea took Yuri by surprise; he had never really thought about it that way.

"No! I mean, yeah, I guess Yakov moved in with Lilia because of me, but I never thought this was going to happen! It was their idea. I certainly didn't encourage them! It's like they're _teenagers_ or something. You should have seen them at Worlds last year. I practically had to shake Yakov to get him to pay attention."

Truth be told, he felt a bit bad about saying this. It was certainly gross, the way Yakov and Lilia had been behaving, and he'd been incredibly annoyed by how distracted they'd been, but they were a bit better now, and he wasn't exactly, precisely _upset_ that they were getting remarried. Anything that stuck it to Sergei Lisitsyn was a win as far as he was concerned, and he supposed he was glad they were happy, even if he did wish that they weren't inflicting it on everyone else.

But Oleg just shook his head. "Ah, Yakov, thinking with his dick as usual."

Yuri could hardly believe his ears. _Yakov?_ After a moment of stunned silence, he burst into a snort of uncontrollable laughter. Oleg laughed too, smiling at him conspiratorially. From down the hallway, Victor gave them a very odd look.

Yuri couldn't help but wonder whether Yakov's remarriage to Lilia counted as _dick thinking_ or not. Maybe it didn't. He pondered the question all the way through the ceremony, glancing up at the ornate white and gold mouldings of the ceiling. You could hardly blame Yakov for wanting to marry her, because Lilia was utterly badass. Yuri would have considered it himself, if she weren't forty years older than him and absolutely terrifying – and, of course, if he were into women.

Why Lilia wanted to marry Yakov... that was more of a mystery. But she seemed to think he was a prize catch, not an old man who grumbled and scratched his balls while he cooked breakfast in the morning, who had hair growing in his nose instead of on top of his head, and limped in damp weather because of his bad knees. 

After they exchanged rings Lilia took Yakov's hands, and smiled at him, and kissed him on the lips in front of everyone. Both of them had tears in their eyes. 

Yuri had held the rings for them, but it was Oleg Petrovich who was prepared now. He dug in his pocket for a small packet of tissues, and handed a few to them. Yakov blew his nose with a big, feeling honk.

Oleg Petrovich smiled nostalgically. "I never thought," he said in an undertone, "that I would be carrying around tissues for Yasha again."

It just went to show, thought Yuri, that you could miss almost anything once you'd gotten used to it.

***

Predictably for November, the weather was terrible: grey, lowering clouds, with gusts of wind and little spits of rain. At least it wasn't snowing. Yakov and Lilia had decided to have their wedding pictures taken right outside the registry office, on the English Embankment, so all the guests followed them outside to shiver while the photographer did his thing. Lilia was wearing a red dress – no White Swan, she – and its long, flowing skirt was blowing in the wind. She put her hand on Yakov's shoulder and gave the camera a look whose smugness could only be compared to Potya's.

Yuri stuck close by Oleg Petrovich's side; he'd promised Yakov that he'd look after the man. Besides which, it was protection from having to talk to Victor. Besides which, there were things that he wanted to ask about. He put his hands in the pockets of his wool trousers, blinking in the mist from the Neva. Lilia was fussing with Yakov's hair, trying to tuck a long, iron-grey strand behind one ear.

"So, is it really true that Yakov got into trouble for going into a supermarket when he was at Lake Placid?"

Oleg Petrovich bridled a little at the question. It wasn't the reaction that Yuri had expected.

"It had nothing to do with me. It was the men in plainclothes who looked after that sort of thing."

"But what did they think he was going to do? Give away state secrets to the oranges or something? Were they worried he was going to defect?"

It all seemed so silly. Yakov liked to tell him these horror stories about what it had been like skating for the U.S.S.R. – _you have no idea how easy you have it, Yura_ – but Yuri was sure that he made half of it up. Things couldn't possibly have been that bad. No one would have put up with it for a second.

"Of course they were worried," said Oleg Petrovich.

"Really? They were?"

"He was lucky they let him compete abroad at all," he said darkly. "He was a handful, I can tell you. Naturally it didn't help that he was a Jew."

He said it like it was an unfortunate but minor affliction from which Yakov had now recovered. Yuri looked again at Yakov and Lilia. She was holding a bouquet of flowers, laughing in the wind that buffeted them both. He had been dimly aware that they were both Jewish, of course: that was why Yakov hadn't been a witness at Victor's church wedding, that was why both of them had relatives in Israel. But he'd never really thought about it much. It hadn't seemed to matter.

"I argued on his behalf!" added Oleg Petrovich. "I was the one who took his side. There were plenty of other people who felt differently, I can tell you."

"So it's true that he could have defected? I mean, he said that they asked him and everything. The Americans. At Lake Placid."

"He never told me that," said Oleg Petrovich sharply.

Yuri bit his lip. Maybe he shouldn't have said. It wasn't like Oleg Petrovich was denying it; it was like he hadn't known. Weird.

Together, as if agreeing that they'd both said too much, they looked back towards the couple leaning against the wall of the embankment. One of Lilia's friends was shouting: "come on, Lilyushka!"

Lilia smiled and turned to face Yakov. She took his hand and gestured at the ground. Grumbling about his knees, Yakov knelt right there in front of her, still holding her hand. Then Lilia leaned forward and lifted one leg in a perfect high arabesque, her foot pointing to the sky. The wedding guests cheered. She held the pose for at least a minute, lit by a strobe of camera flashes. Then she laughed and let her leg fall again.

"It's not easy in this wind, I can tell you!"

Victor rushed forwards to help Yakov up. He looked like he needed it. He was brushing at the knees of his trousers, looking down to hide the lines of pain on his face.

 _That'll be Victor in forty years,_ thought Yuri. _Or less. Me in fifty, I guess. If I'm lucky._

He looked back towards the man standing next to him. "Oleg Petrovich, do you think I'd get better if I learned how to do compulsory figures?"

"Unquestionably."

He couldn't help thinking of Katsuki's amazing step sequences, how much he'd admired them even when he was a stupid kid still in juniors. Katsuki spent a lot of time doing figures, didn't he? Yuri had always thought it was a waste of time, but right now, he was willing to try anything.

"I want you to teach me. I can pay you. I have my own money."

"I have my own money too," said Oleg Petrovich wryly. "I wouldn't ask any payment."

"Sunday is my rest day. Just tell me what rink. I'll come to you."

He had to say it hurriedly because the photographer was motioning him over to join Yakov and Lilia. Oleg Petrovich pressed a business card into his hand. Yuri took a quick glance before he stuffed it into his pocket:

_Oleg Petrovich Petrov_  
_Honoured Master of Sport of the USSR_  
_Honoured Coach of the USSR_

And then he went over to Yakov and Lilia.

"Yura," said Yakov, slapping him on the back. "Just a few photos before we go for dinner."

"You're shivering," said Lilia. "We should buy you a nicer suit. Why is it so difficult to find 100% wool these days?"

"Just me?" said Yuri, looking doubtfully at all the other people standing and watching.

"To commemorate the apartment on the Gribodeyev Canal," said Yakov, drawing Yuri into the picture, close under his arm. "We live together, after all."

It was so weird, like the photographer thought they were a family or something. But it wasn't like posing for _Vogue Russia_. It wasn't difficult at all to stand there with Yakov and Lilia by his side, and to smile.

When they'd finished with the pictures and were getting into the cars to head to the restaurant for lunch, Victor finally caught up with him.

"I saw you making friends with Oleg Petrovich," said Victor, sounding amused. "You'd better watch out. You do know that he was a KGB informer?"

"Ha ha," said Yuri sarcastically. "Thanks for the warning."

Like Victor really expected him to believe that one. Yuri got into the car and shut the door pointedly behind him.

***

**2017/18 season**

While Yuri was making his mediocre rounds of the Grand Prix circuit that autumn (second place, third place), Victor was doing precisely nothing. Well, not _precisely_ nothing. He entered the Minsk-Arena Ice Star. It wasn't because he was fond of Belarus.

Since he hadn't skated a single competition in the previous season – his injury at Rostelecom had come right at the start of it – Victor needed to get his TES minimums before he would be eligible to compete in the European championships and the Olympics. Best to do it in a Senior B competition. No fuss, no muss.

So he went to the Ice Star: one ancient, battered legend, who hadn't skated competitively in a year, in the middle of a field of no hopers, kids and has-beens. Yakov was going to Minsk because he had a couple of girls in juniors. Yuri wouldn't have touched it with a fucking bargepole.

Thankfully Lilia wasn't going to make him watch it on TV, like Yakov would have. On the evening of the short program she sat peacefully brushing Potya's fur, with Rachmaninov on the stereo. Yuri was polishing his skates, sitting thoughtfully on the other side of the room from Potya, who hated the smell. He found himself constantly glancing towards the dark television screen, like it would suddenly spring to life and show him Victor in living color whether he liked it or not.

Lilia eventually noticed, looked up at him. "Did you want to watch the competition? I can turn the music off."

"No," said Yuri. "God, no."

"Then don't."

"I probably should."

There was a big scuff in the leather at the toe of one skate. He'd probably kicked something with it. Yuri rubbed at it angrily, wishing that he could wipe out all his mistakes so easily.

"Why torment yourself?"

"I'm not tormented! Just... Victor. Ugh. I've seen him skate plenty."

Distracted, Lilia had stopped brushing Potya, so Potya's vigorous purring had trailed off. Now she opened one eye and put out a paw to nudge at Lilia's hand. 

"Did Yakov tell you about his free skate? He's doing a medley of all his old programs: _The Best of Nikiforov_. Who the hell even does that? Who does he think he is?"

Lilia picked up the brush again. "He's trying to bolster his confidence," she said, tackling the tricky bit around Potya's belly. Potya often tried to kick Yuri when he did this; with Lilia, she would never dare.

"What?"

"I've had injuries that kept me from dancing," said Lilia. "I've been making comebacks since before you were born. Since before Victor was born. The last of them you saw for yourself; I don't expect I'll choose to put myself through that again. Being, or having been, the best in the world makes it no less terrifying. It may make it more terrifying."

"You think he's afraid?"

"If he's not," said Lilia Baranovskaya, "then he certainly ought to be."

***

Whether he was frightened or not, Victor blew away the competition at the Minsk-Arena Ice Star. He held back most of his quads and scored a good 14 points below his personal best, but it was enough. He was back again, and the world knew it.

Certainly Yuri knew it. Once he'd read the news headlines and taken apart the PDF of the results, he felt strong enough to look at Victor's performance on YouTube. Not fullscreen, though. Yakov would make him watch it anyway, once he got back; starting this way was sort of like exposure therapy.

It was... about as good as you would expect from reading the detailed scoring. Not brilliant, but a Victor Nikiforov performance nonetheless, and his 'not brilliant' was something of which most skaters could only dream. Could Yuri do better? He certainly _could_ – and had – but whether he would have pulled it off on the day was another question entirely. The epic _Bohemian Rhapsody_ vs. _Best of Nikiforov_ deathmatch remained to be fought out.

Yuri made it to the Grand Prix Final that year and came in fifth. Go him.

 _It could have been worse,_ he found himself thinking as he sat staring at his scores in the Kiss and Cry. But no, it was horrible, it was shit. It frightened him that maybe he was actually getting used to being mediocre.

***

"Yakov," said Yuri, "I want to work on compulsory figures with Oleg Petrovich."

It was the day after Yakov got back from Minsk. Yuri had waited until they sat down for dinner. They were having _golubtsy_ , which he thought might put Yakov in an even better mood than the reunion with Lilia had already done.

Originally he'd been intending to sneak out behind Yakov's back for lessons, but he knew that he wouldn't be able to keep it quiet forever, and that it would probably be better to forstall the eventual explosion. Whoever said that it was better to seek forgiveness than permission had never met Yakov. (Or, like Victor, had never actually bothered to understand Yakov.)

Yakov paused with his fork about to bisect a cabbage parcel. "Have I hit my head and travelled back in time to 1970? Because I just thought I heard someone say _Oleg Petrovich_ and _compulsory figures_!"

"Yasha..." said Lilia warningly.

"Only it couldn't possibly be 1970, because back then we used to say to ourselves, dear God, I would rather be sent to the Gulag then spend another hour practicing compulsory figures with Oleg Petrovich!"

This was not going the way Yuri had expected. He had thought he would get credit for showing initiative, or at the very least get credit for asking first.

"Just, like, an hour a week," he said. "I could go on my rest day. No one does them now. I thought it might, you know, give me an edge. So to speak."

"I could teach you compulsory figures! I placed first in them at..."

"Lake Placid, yes I know," said Yuri sulkily. "But he actually thinks it would be useful, and you don't."

Lilia rested her hand on Yakov's. "There's no harm in it, Yasha. He might find it a meditative practice. Reflective."

"Compulsory figures," grumbled Yakov, "are sigils of Satan."

He chopped one of the cabbage parcels in half and stuffed it, full of ground beef, decisively into his mouth. Yuri decided not to point out that there was no way you could trace a pentagram on ice skates.

"Does that mean I can?" he asked instead.

Mouth full, Yakov waved a hand in angry assent. "No more than one hour a week! And I don't want to hear you complain about it afterwards!" He swallowed all in one gulp and turned to Lilia. "Oleg Petrov and Yuri Plisetsky. Can you imagine a more unholy alliance?"

Lilia looked immensely amused. "I," she said to Yuri, "will very much look forward to hearing how this turns out."

***

Yuri arranged to meet with Oleg Petrovich every Sunday afternoon. It was impossible to go to a proper rink, he said, because no one would book patch time for figures anymore. So they practiced at some random rink during public ice time, with families and groups of teenage friends and random hockey players all zooming around at random. Yuri chose a patch and defended it by sheer force of will. Everyone knew he was Yuri Plisetsky, after all; no one was willing to get in his way.

Oleg Petrovich was so old that he literally couldn't get into a pair of skates anymore: he would come tottering onto the ice in his street shoes, which was terrifying. And yet miraculously his eyesight was good enough that he could spot even the slightest wobble in Yuri's painstakingly slow figures. He came from the Russian coaches' school of shouting, so there was certainly no problem hearing him.

"Do you call that a back outside edge?" he would scream in his quavery voice. "You're losing momentum! Don't flail your arms around like that!"

Afterwards, he would lean heavily on Yuri's elbow to study the print and the tracings, every curve and bite of Yuri's edges carved into a damning permanent record of his failings.

"That is laughably bad," said Oleg Petrovich, frowning at the ice like he was a doctor examining the EKG of a flatlining patient and wondering if it was worth attempting resucitation. "Look at that wobble. And look at how you adoringly traced over it the second and third time. You're meant to correct your mistakes, not make love to them."

Oleg Petrovich's acerbic commentary livened up what would otherwise have been an excruciatingly boring hour. Yuri couldn't believe that people had once spent hours and hours every day practicing their figures. It explained why Yakov still twitched whenever they were mentioned – and why people's jumps had been so shit back then.

When word had first got out that Yuri Plisetsky was practicing every week at the same public session, his fans had appeared, packing the rinkside and the rink café and the ice itself, eager to catch a glimpse of their idol. But although a few stalwarts remained, most of them had quickly melted away. That was exactly how boring compulsory figures were. Not even the most dedicated of Angels was going to want to watch him sliding slowly across the ice on one edge at the approximate speed of a snail, or to crouch over next to Oleg Petrovich, wondering whether his counter was beaked.

Yuri didn't mind – or, to be more accurate, he did mind, but he was used to it. Stretching was boring; physio was boring; weight training was boring; cardio was boring. Everyone thought that elite figure skating was all glittery costumes and the roar of the crowd. In fact it was long hours of boredom punctuated by people shouting at you.

If you didn't think it was worthwhile, then you didn't skate. It was that simple. This was what it took to be the best.

***

Russian Nationals were upon them. It was, as Georgi had always been fond of saying, the darkest time of the year. For a whole generation of Russian figure skaters there had been no point in aspiring to stand on the top step of the podium, because Victor had landed there at seventeen and made it his home for the next twelve years.

Usually, after the Grand Prix Final, Nationals came as a bit of an anticlimax. Olympic years were different. Everyone was watching – not least the Figure Skating Federation of Russia. With only one Olympics slot at stake, there was no way Victor could skip Nationals this year. He would be competing, and Yuri would be waiting for him.

It wasn't the first time that Yuri had gone up against Victor at Nationals. Yakov had let him compete when he was fourteen, two weeks after he'd won the Junior Grand Prix, as a warning of what was to come in seniors. With his ragged step sequences and his missing quads, he'd come in fourth and thought _just wait for next year._

This year, three years later, he was going to slay. He was going to defeat Victor so convincingly that there was no way the FSFR could pick anyone else for the Olympics. So he told himself. So he told his sports psychologist.

***

Last year, Nationals had been in Chelyabinsk, the middle of nowhere. This year they were in Saint Petersburg, actually at the Yubileyny Sports Palace, his home rink. Even though it was in the big rink rather than the small practice rink, it was still fucking anticlimactic.

"This is so lame," said Yuri. "I could _walk_ to Nationals."

"You're not going to walk to Nationals!" said Yakov firmly. "Then you really would be lame!"

Of course he wasn't going to walk. It was freezing and it would have taken at least forty minutes from Kolomna. Yakov was incapable of taking a joke.

You might have thought that it would be cool to have Nationals in his own city. He could invite all his friends. Except that he didn't have any friends apart from Otabek. So all it seemed to boil down to was Lilia booking a box for her own friends, the _Sex and the City_ crowd who went to brunch with her every weekend.

"I don't know why you invited them," Yuri grumbled. "They don't care about me. All they can think of to say to me is how much I've grown. Still! I stopped growing months ago!"

"They're not coming to support you," said Lilia. "They're coming to support _me_. Because this is the project to which, at great personal sacrifice, I have devoted myself for the past two and a half years."

"I'm not a project," said Yuri. 

But there was nothing he could do about it. All the brunch ladies had apparently sent enthusiastic RSVPs, and they were coming, and that was final.

***

Victor was coming too. 

With Katsuki in tow, he blew into the Yubileyny Sport Palace like a whirlwind. Suddenly they were everywhere, arms around each other, heads leaning together as they talked. Katsuki wore a sharp new suit, his coach's accreditation hanging around his neck. Katsuki carried the Makkachin tissue case, Katsuki took Victor's skate guards, Katsuki put his hands on Victor's shoulders and gave him a stern few words before he took the ice. Victor was the student now, nodding earnestly at his coach as he slipped his old Sochi jacket from his shoulders. It was so strange, and so very like them. They'd somehow conned the whole world into playing along with their weird role-reversal roleplay – and Yuri, for one, hadn't consented to it.

What really pissed Yuri off – apart from having to watch them, which was sickening – was what a waste it was for Katsuki. He ought to be coaching someone who could learn from him, who actually wanted to learn from him. Victor had won a medal at the Olympics when Katsuki was barely even in juniors, and he hadn't listened to his coach even back then. Now, at nearly thirty, with all those victories behind him, was there a chance he gave a damn about anything anyone told him? Maybe that was why he'd wanted Katsuki coaching him, so that he wouldn't have to listen.

It didn't matter, though. Yuri was going to destroy him one way or another.

"Lucky thirteen," said Yuri to Victor while they were warming up.

Victor looked up from his stretches with a quizzical, _do I know you?_ expression.

"Is it?" he said. "I wasn't keeping track."

"Why don't you surprise everyone by losing this time?"

Victor's mouth twisted in what might have been a suppressed laugh. "I think most people are expecting me to lose."

Yuri didn't know what to say to that. He regretted saying anything at all.

***

Victor was in the lead going into the free skate. Not by a lot, not by a Victor-sized margin, but enough that most people assumed he was just going to stroll in and take what was rightfully his. 

He was skating before Yuri, so Yakov had banned Yuri from even glancing at the television coverage backstage. Yakov didn't want him to get spooked by Victor skating clean – or breaking his back. Yuri was so very banned that Lilia was hovering by the TV to provide an extra line of defence.

So, jogging in place with another ten minutes to go, he was stunned when Yakov suddenly grabbed him by the arm and pulled him over to the TV. Lilia clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

"Look," said Yakov firmly. "Look at that."

Victor was just stepping off the ice after his skate, taking his skate guards from Katsuki's hands. He looked exhausted. He was smiling, of course, but that told you nothing.

And then they started in on the slow motion replays. First quad immaculate. A spin, level 4 naturally. Second quad in combination, a terrible running edge but Victor was too good to let it go, and he made the triple toe with sheer will. After that it all started to unravel a little. A hand down here. One jump tilted so crazily that only Victor could have saved it. His famous quad flip tripled. And you could just see him flagging by the end, his stamina ebbing by the second.

It said something about Victor's talent that he hadn't fallen. It said something about his performance that this was a compliment.

"Fuck," said Yuri. "That... wasn't great."

He felt his whole body tingling with the realisation, like the pain of your fingers coming back to life after long hours out in the cold.

In the Kiss and Cry, Victor blew kisses at the camera, like he always did. (Victor would have blown kisses to the camera in the middle of a perp walk.) Katsuki stared at the scores as if he could intimidate them into improving by sheer power of will. Then he smacked Victor on the back.

"Better next time," he said. "I know you can do better."

Victor smiled ruefully and shrugged for the cameras.

"He's left the door open," said Yakov. "You just have to walk through it."

***

Walking through a door wasn't always that easy. Sometimes you bounced off the doorframe first. Yuri stepped off the ice after his free skate thinking that he hadn't done enough. He hadn't blown Victor away, so the judges would screw him over in the scoring. It was inevitable.

Yakov seemed to think so too. He pulled Yuri into a big bear hug.

"I'm proud of you," he said in an undertone. "Whatever the score is."

Yuri sat waiting for his scores still half in a daze, shivering with his team jacket around his shoulders as the chill of the rink began to sink in. It was taking forever. Probably they were dithering about exactly how much they could screw him over without making it look ridiculous. He started thinking about what he should do when the scores got posted. Maybe he should just stand up and walk out with dignity. As much dignity as he could muster walking in ice skates, which wasn't much.

 _He knew it was wrong,_ people would say. _There was nothing he could do, but at least he didn't take it lying down._

And then, then he would...

The scores. Finally.

Yuri blinked at the screen. Yakov was shaking him so hard that he couldn't even read them. First in the free skate which meant... Oh god, he couldn't breathe. Why didn't they post it?

First in the overall. First. _First._

"What?" said Yuri. "What?!"

He leapt to his feet, punched the air. Dimly he was aware of the cameraman cursing and trying to adjust the shot. Then Yakov was on his feet as well, hugging him and saying "well done, well done."

Yuri Nicolaievich Plisetsky was Russian national champion for the second year in a row. And for the first time in his life, he'd beaten Victor Nikiforov.

He hardly had the time to get used to the idea. Before he knew it they were rolling out the red carpet and shoving him out towards the podium. It was so weird climbing up to the top step. It felt wrong, like Yakov was going to march out any minute, grab him by the arm and drag him off again, saying _Yura, stop playing around, there are people watching!_ But no one came, no one told him off – because this was where he was meant to be standing. At the top.

When he'd won gold at the Grand Prix Final, he'd been such a little shrimp that his head had barely been level with Katsuki's, even though he'd been standing on the step above him. Now – quite literally – he was head and shoulders above Victor.

Looking down on Victor was the weirdest thing of all. He'd been dreaming about this moment for most of his life, and now it was finally here. He was trying to remember, now, what he'd expected it to feel like. He stood there, blinking into the lights, watching the officials scurry around getting the medals and bouquets ready, waiting for the feeling to arrive.

He glanced again at Victor. This seemed like the perfect time to lean over and tell him that he could see his bald spot from here – even though he couldn't, not really, just the little whorl of silver hair at the crown of his head. He gathered himself to deliver the message, like he would have gathered himself for a difficult jump. _Just fucking retire already, old man, you're only embarrassing yourself._

Then he looked at Victor for the third time. Victor was smiling, looking as smug and serene and infuriatingly untouchable as he always did, like winning silver was all part of his grand plan. But he was smiling with his lips pressed together, the corners of his mouth moving just a little bit. Yuri could see his chest moving under the lycra of his costume; it was the way you breathed when you felt just slightly sick to your stomach. Victor was fighting back tears.

When they put the gold medal around his neck, Yuri was the one who started crying.

***

In a continuing theme of unexciting competition locations, the European Championships were in Moscow that year. But there was an upside: because he had so little travelling to do this year, Yakov had agreed to let Yuri spend the New Year's Holiday with his grandad. Most of it, anyway. Having a week off only two weeks before Europeans would have been too much, so Yuri had to leave again two days before Christmas. It didn't really matter; they never did much for Christmas anyway, because grandad wasn't big on church. New Year's was the holiday that counted.

One of his aunts always threw a big bash on New Year's Eve at her place in Kuzminki. Dozens of Plisetskys and assorted hangers-on crammed into a three-room _Khrushchovka_ apartment – heaven or hell depending on how you looked at it. It was so hot and stuffy inside that condensation was rolling down the windows even before all the guests had arrived. 

They had everything you needed for a New Year's Eve party: a big buffet table with cheap champagne and caviar and salads groaning with kilos of mayonnaise, a decked-out tree, _The Irony of Fate_ on TV, fireworks piled high in the hallway waiting for midnight. His grandad had brought pirozhki as always. Yuri had brought himself. He pulled off his least favorite Bosco Sport puffer jacket, the one he'd worn just for the occasion, and threw onto a bed with all the other coats, half hoping that someone would 'accidentally' walk off with it.

"Yuratchka!" everyone exclaimed when they saw him. "You're so tall! How's the skating? Are you world champion yet? Are you going to win gold at the Olympics?"

"I'm Russian champion," said Yuri. "Two years in a row. Worlds aren't till March, after the Olympics."

Because he sure as hell wasn't going to mention coming in seventeenth at Worlds last year. If they cared so much they could have watched it on TV or read about it on the internet, but they clearly hadn't. Once he actually started talking about skating, people's eyes would glaze over. Or they would gaze past his shoulder, suddenly noticing a bowl of pickled tomatoes on the buffet table that they really wanted to check out.

No one really cared, Yuri concluded. They just wanted to have asked; they didn't actually want to know. So he left his grandad to brag about him (for some reason people cared when _he_ said it) and went in search of food. His aunt had made a whole roast suckling pig. Yuri loved pork, but Yakov and Lilia didn't, so he almost never got to eat it. He devoted himself lovingly to that suckling pig and in the end made a big contribution to its demolition.

While he was eating he got buttonholed by one of his uncles, who was going on about how he'd just discovered this amazing investment opportunity. It was a string of kiosks in central Moscow, or maybe a used car business, or something to do with imports and exports. Or maybe it was all of the above, it wasn't quite clear. He knew people, he kept saying, it was a surefire thing, he just needed some help to get off the ground. 

It took Yuri ages to realize that his uncle thought he should invest in this.

"I'm not, like, rich or anything," he said awkwardly. "I don't... I mean, I have to pay my coach and my choreographer and stuff."

Across the room, his granddad, full of pride, was announcing: "He just bought me a new car!"

Thankfully Yuri was saved by his aunt, who came swooping in, shaking her head and saying "Pavlik, are you talking to that poor boy about that ridiculous business venture of yours?"

Nothing could save him from cousin Volodya, who was absolutely determined to make sure that he drank vodka until he puked. 

It wasn't like Yuri had anything against drinking until he puked, particularly if it also got Victor in trouble. (Lilia still hadn't forgiven Victor for that dinner in London.) But he was damned if he was going to do it two weeks before the European Championships. Or just because Vova wanted him to.

"Come on, have another one," said Volodya, sloshing the bottle around in front of him. "Come on, what are you afraid of?"

"I told you I didn't want any more!"

Volodya shoved the mouth of the bottle up against his lips. "You're going to drink it!" 

Yuri pushed it away. "Go eat a bag of dicks," he said, using his newfound height to put some authority into the statement. "You can't make me. Just fucking try."

For a second he thought they were actually going to get into a shoving match right there in front of the Olivier salad. Volodya was four years older and had been picking on him basically ever since he was born. But Volodya spent most of his time lying on his mom's couch smoking weed, whereas Yuri spent most of his time training for the Olympics, and there was a sudden moment when they both realised this.

"Pussy!" said Volodya and stalked off.

Half an hour later Yuri could hear another of his cousins saying, just loud enough to be overheard: "Who does he think he is, anyway? Does he think he's better than us?"

And this was, like, the functional part of the family. His mother wasn't even there.

***

Yuri spent most of the rest of the evening fighting off yawns. He was never up past his nine thirty lights out at this time of year, and the apartment was so hot that it was making him drowsy. He squeezed himself into a corner of the couch and pretended to be really interested in the New Year's Eve show on TV. But he soldiered on through to the President's speech and the champagne toasts. (Of course he had a couple of glasses of champagne, it wasn't like he was a monk.)

After that, everyone trooped outside to light fireworks, along with most of the rest of the apartment block. Stifling yawns behind his scarf, Yuri watched as his uncles and cousins argued over how to set them up and who would get to set them off. All this was punctuated by a backdrop of bangs and pops and crackles, explosions of light casting weird, moving, multicolored shadows onto the snow. Overhead there were big blossoms of color from the municipal display; around them, a thousand smaller explosions. From an apartment window, people were singing.

In the middle of the parking lot there was a gigantic frozen puddle where the little kids were sliding back and forth on it, squealing and grabbing each other. Their snowsuits were so puffy that even if they fell over, they hardly noticed.

Yuri might not have known much about fireworks, but ice was his element. He took a sparkler in each hand and, in his snow boots, launched into a series of wild, one-footed spins to welcome in 2018. 

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

***

New Year's morning was just him and grandad, sitting together in the little living room drinking tea with jam as the snow fell outside. Usually you could hear the drone of the traffic on the street below. Today there was silence.

It was perfect – well, it was almost perfect. Instead of Potya, who was back in Piter, they had grandad's cat Pushka. But she did her best, curling up underneath their little fake tree in between the presents.

Yuri got a couple of video games and an iTunes gift card and a pair of tiger stripe soakers for his skates. He'd started to wonder whether he ought to move on from the whole big cat patterns thing. He was nearly eighteen now, wasn't it maybe just a little too childish? But grandad didn't know that he'd been thinking that, and Yuri sure as hell wasn't going to say it now – and really, honestly, the soakers were pretty awesome.

"I'm going to take them to the Olympics," he said, hoping that he'd be able to keep his promise.

Yuri had bought his grandad a new winter parka, a really warm one with a fur collar, which Lilia had helped him pick out at Bosco. Grandad held it up in front of him and admired it like it was a pelt that Yuri had hunted and tanned himself. 

"This is extravagant, Yuratchka, you shouldn't have. After the car..."

"When I get my next big sponsorship," said Yuri, "I'm going to buy you a new apartment. So don't say that."

His grandad started to protest.

"No," said Yuri again. "Don't say that. I will. You deserve it."

And there was one more present under the tree. Yuri had knitted his grandad a scarf, which Lilia had taught him how to do. It hadn't exactly been his idea: she kept saying that he spent too much time playing video games and 'mindlessly surfing the internet' in the evenings. In fact it wasn't mindless at all, because he was busy seeing what people were saying about him and about Victor (and occasionally leaving anonymous comments of his own about Victor's advanced age and disability), but that cut no ice whatsoever with Lilia. 

She said that it would be good for him to have something relaxing to do. Which was such bullshit, because it turned out there was nothing relaxing about knitting. You had two needles to manage, and yarn that got tangled up if you even looked at it, and it turned out there were actually different stitches, and you had to keep count the whole time, and if you dropped the little loops off your needle then the whole fucking thing started to unravel immediately unless you could find them and put them back again. It was like compulsory figures only with yarn.

She'd wanted to teach him to make a _pattern_ or something but she'd quickly downgraded her expectations to something less superhuman. So it was that his grandad unwrapped a six foot scarf, knit entirely in garter stitch, in a heavy forest-green wool. It looked like a large woolly python.

"It's not fancy or anything," said Yuri, abashed. "But it'll keep your neck warm. I made it. That's why it's not fancy. I messed up at the end there, you can see how the stitches are too loose..."

"Yuratchka," said his grandad, interrupting the apology. "I didn't know you knew how to knit!"

"I didn't. Lilia taught me. But I'm not very good at it. She said I should give it to you anyway."

It was weird; his grandad looked even more impressed by the scarf then he had been by the parka. 

"It's wonderful, Yuratchka. My neck won't be cold this winter, I can tell you."

After they finished opening presents, grandad settled down with a beer to watch some hockey. Evgeni Plushenko was smashing it in yet another NHL game. Yuri tried to feign interest for a while; then he got out his new knitting project, which he'd just started.

Grandad looked over. "Oh, are you making yourself a scarf too?"

"No, it's, uh..." Embarassed, he mumbled the next three words as quickly as he possibly could. "It's for mom."

***

The European Championships were Yuri's final chance to put the stake through Victor's heart, to nail down the lid of the coffin before the Figure Skating Federation of Russia made their choice. To underline to the selection committee that he – not Victor – was the man who deserved to go to Pyeongchang.

Perhaps for this very reason, Victor had chosen not to compete in the European Championships at all, coming out with some bullshit about some minor knee injury and how the FSFR had agreed to let him take the time to recover. It was unfair. It was outrageous. If there was any justice, Yuri would have been selected for the Olympics on the spot, but there was no justice in this world.

All the sports commentators in Russia – and a lot of people who should never have been let near a microphone, much less a pair of skates – were working overtime coming up with opinions about this. If Yuri cared to listen he could have chosen one from the list. It didn't matter because the FSFR would pick Victor anyway. It didn't matter because Victor was past it and Nationals had proven that, which was clearly why he had skipped Euros. He was more badly injured than anyone knew; being defeated by Yuri Plisetsky at Nationals had destroyed him psychologically; he'd been delivering payoffs to the FSFR and ISU for years now; he was having a secret affair with Yana Rudkovskaya and she was having his baby. OK, the last was from the tabloids but it just went to prove that you could find whatever opinion you wanted on Victor Nikiforov.

Yuri didn't know what to think. Yakov flatly refused to discuss the question with him at all, saying that Victor only got him worked up.

"You think about doing your best!" he said as they were waiting for their flight at Pulkovo. "That's all you need to think about!"

Yuri wondered how on earth you were meant to think about only one thing. His mind was spinning with the Olympics, with Victor, with the thought that Grandad and Ilya would both be in the audience at Europeans, with everything.

They landed at Domdedovo in the midst of a swirling shower of snow, the sun already beginning to break through somewhere above. The plane was buffeting around in gusts of wind but he barely noticed.

"Yura!" said Yakov ten minutes later. "We're at the gate! You were a million miles away, what on earth has gotten into you?"

"Nothing," mumbled Yuri.

His sports psychologist had gone through this whole long boring thing with him about visualizing success. You were meant to envision your perfect skate in excruciating detail, how you would feel and exactly what you would do from the moment you pulled on your skates to the final pose and the cheers of the crowd. You were supposed to do it every day, or whenever you got anxious or something. It was about as inspiring as flossing.

Yuri had adapted the technique for his own purposes. He had concocted a scenario in which Victor got to the Olympics by paying off the FSFR because he was too busy having a torrid affair with Yana Rudkovskaya to compete at Europeans. But Yana's husband Evgeni Plushenko (who was captain of the Russian national hockey team, as well as being an NHL star) found out about them. Just as Victor took the ice for his short program at the Olympics, Plushenko leapt down from the VIP seats and delivered a righteous hockey-style beatdown that was broadcast live around the globe with full commentary. Yuri had to skate in Victor's place, won gold, and afterwards consoled Katsuki energetically and repeatedly.

That was Yuri's scenario. It worked amazingly well whenever he needed a distraction from anxiety. He was proud of it.

"It didn't look like nothing," said Yakov warily.

"God, Yakov, I was just doing my visualizations like the sports psychologist told me! Give me _some_ credit."

Yakov just mumbled something – the tone equal parts complimentary, sceptical and dismissive – and heaved himself up out of the seat into the aisle of the plane, using his bulk to make room. 

Yuri stayed in his seat by the window, waiting for people to start to move once they opened the doors. The better part of elite athletics was knowing when to expend energy – and when to rest.

***

It was Old New Year. One more chance to say goodbye to the shitshow that had been 2017. Yakov must have been feeling sentimental, or particularly happy about Yuri's win at Nationals, because he'd agreed to come to Moscow a day early so that Yuri could spend the night with his grandad.

They spent the evening like they always did, making dumplings together in the little kitchen while Pushka the cat watched with interest from her perch on top of the refrigerator. Yuri loved cooking with his grandad. It ought to have been the perfect thing to do, something to keep his hands busy and his mind off the competition in three days' time, but he just couldn't settle. In between dumplings he paced restlessly around the kitchen, doing stretches that he really didn't need to be doing. He used the refrigerator to do a front stretch. Pushka batted unhappily at his toes; she knew perfectly well that they didn't belong up there.

His grandad dusted off his floury hands on his apron and turned to look at Yuri.

"Nerves, Yuratchka? It's just like when you were a little boy."

Because, of course, Yuri hadn't been home before a competition in over a decade.

"I don't know, grandad, I... yeah, I guess. I'm sorry."

"You don't need to be sorry."

"Yeah, but I was so excited about getting to spend Old New Year's with you, and now I'm messing it all up. I just..."

Yuri shrugged, wandered over to his grandad's side so that he could lean against him for a moment. He smelled, faintly and comfortingly, like yeasty beer and pipe smoke and pickled mushrooms.

"You're not messing anything up, Yuratchka," said his grandad, ruffling flour into his hair. "You've done so well. I'm so proud of you. They're going to send you to the Olympics, aren't they?"

Yuri took a hitching breath. "I don't know if they are," he confessed.

"But you won at Nationals. And Victor isn't going to be competing at Europeans, is he? So who else would they pick?"

His grandad watched everything Yuri competed in, even the ones where he had to get help from Yuri's cousins to find the dodgy pirated streams on the internet, but sometimes he missed the fine points. With anyone else, Yuri would have been frustrated at having to explain this again, but with his grandad, he didn't mind.

"Yeah, but like, it's Victor. So they _told_ him that he could skip Europeans and they _said_ that they'd wait until after Europeans to decide. They think I'm inconsistent, they think that I might choke. They're just waiting to see if I do."

 _They're hoping I will,_ he could have added.

"You won't," said his grandad firmly. "I know you won't."

Yuri had his doubts. He felt like he might choke right there in his grandad's kitchen, hiding his face against his grandad's shoulder and biting his lip so that he didn't cry. He could feel the bands of panic tightening around his chest. He tried to think about anything else, but for once the idea of Victor getting beaten up by a jealous Evgeni Plushenko didn't seem even a tiny bit funny.

Two big thuds as Pushka leapt down from the refrigerator to the counter and then down to the floor. She twined around their legs, purring hopefully, and Yuri bent down to scratch her between the ears. That loosened his chest a little bit.

"Well," said his grandad. "Enough about that. You'll think about it tomorrow. In the mean time we have dumplings to make, don't we?"

***

Just as he'd feared, Yuri choked at the European Championships. It made him feel sick, knowing that he was competing against someone who wasn't even there. One fall and one underrotation. He came in fifth.

"But look at those lovely deep edges," said John on British Eurosport. "His jumping might still be inconsistent but his step sequences are definitely improving, don't you think?"

"Yes," said Megan. "In an interview last week he said that he's been working on compulsory figures with Yakov Feltsman's old coach! Maybe it's something that more skaters ought to think about trying."

"Whatever he's doing, it's worked! Hats off to him, being willing to change things up. We'll see whether that cuts any ice with the Figure Skating Federation of Russia."

"Yes, John, let's talk about that one slot for Russia at the Olympics. Do you think Plisetsky's done enough to make the case?"

"Well, Megan, I don't know about that..."

***

No one fucking knew. Even the FSFR themselves didn't know. Or were pretending they didn't know.

A day after Europeans, they announced that Victor would be skating for them in a private test session to demonstrate his readiness for the Olympics. Kasuki was invited as Victor's chosen athlete representative. Yakov was invited, apparently because they thought someone Russian ought to be there on Victor's behalf. And that was it.

It was like there hadn't just been a major fucking international competition where Victor could have shown exactly how ready he was, in comparison with – say – Yuri himself. It was like they didn't actually want the world to know. It was very much like they were planning a stitch-up.

"Yakov, I can't believe you're actually going!" exclaimed Yuri on the morning of the test event, hoping that he sounded outraged and indignant rather than how he actually felt – which was betrayed.

"Of course I'm going," said Yakov, getting his coat down from the coat rack. "What else can I do?"

"You could say no! You could say you won't go unless they let me skate. And Sasha Velikov too. It's so unfair! Can't you see how fucking unfair it is?"

Yakov sighed. "It's the FSFR, isn't it? There's nothing I can do about it. We have to dance to their tune, whatever it might be."

Yuri wondered whether Yakov was actually that unhappy about dancing to their tune. He was Yuri's coach, yes, and no longer Victor's. Victor had left him twice now, but he had been Victor's coach since before Yuri was born. He had loved Victor first and, though Yuri tried not to think about it, you couldn't help but wonder whether he still loved Victor best.

He wanted to hear Yakov shouting and bellowing like only he could do, trumpeting to the skies about the wrongs of the FSFR like an angry bull elephant. But Yakov wasn't going to do it.

"We'll see," said Yakov. "We'll see."

He patted Yuri on the shoulder and closed the door behind him.

***

"We're going for a walk," said Lilia to Yuri once Yakov had gone. 

Naturally Yuri assumed that she wanted to distract him from thinking about the test skate. Why did everyone insist on treating him like such a child? Only once they got outside it became clear that what she actually wanted was to rant at him – _him!_ – about the Figure Skating Federation of Russia and all of their bullshit.

"Never in my life have I encountered such blatant, outrageous political maneuvering!" she said, her breath drifting into clouds of fog around her face. "And I danced for the Bolshoi Ballet under the Soviets!"

"Yeah," said Yuri, pulling his scarf a little tighter around his face. 

It was frigid, not much more than -20C, and even at 11am the sun wasn't high enough to provide any help. As they picked their way across Rimsky-Korsakov Prospect, the rutted snow in the street was frozen solid, and all the cars had their headlights on.

"And Yasha – no, I shouldn't say, it's difficult."

"He'd be happy if they picked Victor," said Yuri, feeling a sickening drop in his stomach. He wished that Lilia hadn't said anything. He might have suspected it, but then he suspected a lot of things. He didn't actually want to know that they were true.

"He loves you both like sons. Both of you! It's impossible for him to take sides."

Yuri didn't know what he had expected to hear, but that wasn't it.

"But you know, don't you," added Lilia, "that I have no difficulty whatsoever in taking sides?"

"Yes, Lilia Mikhailovna," he said, and the thought warmed him just a little.

They walked and walked, up the Kryukov Canal past the Mariinsky to New Holland Island, and then along the Moyka. It was a gusty, changeable day, banks of dark cloud and little bursts of flurries interspersing themselves with clear sky, pale and lemony, almost the same color as the palaces lining the banks of the river. The snowbanks were piled high, spilling in frozen avalanches back into the roads. Yuri offered Lilia his arm as they clambered over the banks, not because she needed it – her balance was surely just as good as his – but because she had taught him that it showed respect. 

He found himself thinking angrily that he might just twist his ankle. Then tomorrow the FSFR could announce that Yuri Plisetsky had withdrawn from consideration for the Olympics due to a minor injury. It would save face for him, if nothing else – but it would also let the FSFR off the hook. He wanted to stay uninjured, thank you, and if they were going to screw him over, he wanted the world to know exactly what they'd done.

The temperature had been dropping continuously as the clear weather blew in. Last night there had been freezing rain and every branch of every tree was still coated with ice. The sun never touched the streets or the canal, but it lit up the highest branches with brilliant gold. On the eaves of every building, the icicles and ice dams had refrozen crazily tilted, as if arrested just on the verge of falling – and they also glittered in the sun. It was as if he and Lilia were walking through the lands of a mad ice king.

And Yuri, unfortunately, knew exactly who that was.

***

In a surprise to precisely no one, the Figure Skating Federation of Russia announced that they had selected Victor Nikiforov to represent Russia in men's singles skating at the Pyeongchang Olympics.

The outrage over Victor being chosen for Worlds back in 2016 was been nothing compared to this. Headlines in all the papers – not just on the sports pages. A thirty-page thread on Golden Skate. Tamara Trusova called up Yakov to shout at him over the phone again – even though she must have known that her Sasha had never really been in the running for the Olympics. 

A couple of rogue Yuri's Angels got busted for sending death threats to Victor on Twitter. A little scary at first – you never knew what nutcases were out there – but funny in the end, because they turned out to be two thirteen-year-old girls from Omsk. Yuri couldn't entirely blame them. He'd certainly often been tempted to tell Victor to die in a fire.

At first it was hard for Yuri to grasp that he'd really lost. Standing on a podium below Victor, that was one thing, but this was so abstract. Victor and Katsuki had cleared off back to Japan the day after the test event; Yuri had never even seen them. Apparently (who knew why) they'd decided not to stop by and say hello.

It was bad enough not getting to compete at the Olympics, but it wasn't just about the sport anymore. Until Victor's selection, Yuri had been getting lots of interest from sponsors. Everyone wanted to have the new young skating star as the face of their brand for the Olympic season, until suddenly he wasn't going to the Olympics anymore. Yuri had been planning to give his grandfather the money to buy a new apartment before the government knocked his old one down. Now, from every billboard, on every television channel, Victor smiled sweetly at him in adverts that should have been his own. Now there was nothing for Yuri, no sponsorships at all, and he had no idea when – or whether – that would ever change. 

The worst of it was that Yuri couldn't even say "how could you do this to me," because that would imply he thought Victor had ever cared about him. And right now he wondered, he really did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Russian holiday calendar is not the same as the traditional Western one. New Year's is the big holiday in Russia: they put up a tree and give their gifts then, as well as having the usual fireworks and toasts on New Year's Eve. Then Christmas, which is mainly a religious holiday, is on January 7th (because the Russian Orthodox church still uses the Julian calendar). Then a final, minor holiday is Old New Year on January 14th, the date of the new year in the Julian calendar. It sounds like not much gets done in Russia in the first two weeks of the year.
> 
> Compulsory figures were a part of all international figure skating competitions until 1990. Here's a good [illustration of how they worked](https://youtu.be/jU9Hy1upUr0?t=4m25s), starring Scott Hamilton. And here's [Brian Orser competing in compulsory figures back in 1988](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJDOxzANY1s).


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because this is not That Doping Fic, I've ignored the breaking news that Russia has been banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics (with individual clean athletes allowed to compete as Olympic Athletes from Russia). Maybe there will be a bonus feature later on.

**February 2018**

Yuri was going to the Olympics as Victor's alternate. Big cheer.

Being an alternate for the Olympics was hardly even a thing. No blessing from the Patriarch before you left Russia, no Team Russia Olympic kit, no credentials and no tickets. You didn't get to walk in the opening ceremony and you didn't get to stay in the Olympic village. You weren't part of the Olympic team at all. You barely got to do anything apart from fly halfway around the world and hope that someone died. No one had even added Yuri to the unofficial 2018 Winter Olympics figure skating group chat, which really sucked.

 _You're going to be there, aren't you?_ said Otabek in their private channel. _So you should be in the chat. I'll add you._

_Lots of people are going to be at the Olympics. They're called fans. If you add me, I'll fucking kill you._

There was nothing he wanted less than pity. He sat in the departures lounge at Pulkovo staring at his phone, thumb hovering over the keyboard, trying to think of something to say next. Should he change the subject? Maybe he should change the subject. Apparently Otabek was facing the same dilemma, wherever he was, because the chat stayed static. Nothing. Shit. 

Yuri sighed and tucked his phone into the pocket of his Russian national team jacket. It was the same boring old jacket he'd had, in different styles, since he'd been recruited to the national team at eleven. He looked up. A television on the wall, tuned to Russia 24, was showing footage of the Olympic team boarding their charter plane at Sheremetevo yesterday. Again. 

How many times could they show that fucking clip? _Some people got onto a plane yesterday._ How was that even news? Who actually gave a shit? He'd watched it the first time it had come on the TV, wanting to see whether he could spot Mila in the middle of all the other athletes, but once had been more than enough.

To make matters worse, they cut straight from the scene at the gate to an interview with Victor Nikiforov. He was standing off to one side in the departures lounge, blinking into the camera light as if the favor of the Russian nation was shining on him alone.

"It might be my fourth Olympics," he said, smiling with carefully calculated modesty, his hair falling across his face, "but it never gets any less special. I'm honored to have been chosen to represent Russia, and even more honored to know that I'll be Russia's flagbearer at Pyeongchang."

His jacket was showily zipped up, 'Россия' blazoned across his chest in blocky white letters. In the background some hockey player was doing a V-sign for the cameras. _If I were there, I would have given them the finger,_ thought Yuri, even though he knew he would have done nothing of the kind.

"And what do you say to those who have criticized your selection for the Games, saying that it was..."

Lilia, sitting next to him, cleared her throat. "Yuratchka, they're boarding."

They weren't actually boarding. They were just calling the people who needed extra time to get down the jet bridge. Yuri wasn't a fool, he flew all the time. He wasn't going to stand around for nothing.

"Just a second."

Also, he might have seen this interview with Victor three times already, but he wanted to see it again. Just to ask himself once more whether he could make out a faint look of guilt in Victor's eyes.

"I would say that the decision has been made," said the Victor on the screen, his smile as glassy and fixed as the recording. The rest of his words were lost in the hubbub of people starting to rush the gate, but Yuri remembered exactly what he'd said. "Whatever their feelings about it, I'm going to the Olympics now and that's not going to change. It's in the past."

It was Victor through and through. Anyone else would have looked at their five world championships and twelve national championships and three Olympic medals and said, _fuck it, I was the best for a decade, now I'm going to sleep in till noon and stuff my fucking face._ But not Victor, not now. He couldn't rest on his laurels, on the victories of the past, because he couldn't bring himself to admit that _he_ was in the past. And it didn't look like he regretted a single thing.

Yuri ripped off his team jacket and stuffed it furiously into his carry-on bag. He'd thought that wearing it was better than nothing, better than going to the airport looking like some random ordinary teenager – but it was so, so much worse than nothing. He didn't want anyone looking at him. He pulled the elastic from his ponytail, shook out his hair so that it fell down around his shoulders and into his face. Like that was really going to help.

Lilia, standing with her arms folded, raised an eyebrow at him. "Well?"

"OK, OK, I'm coming."

He got up reluctantly, like it was a very great effort, and slung his bag over one shoulder. His Team Russia bag. Sometimes, much though he hated to accept it, there was no winning.

It was only him and Lilia boarding the Aeroflot flight to Seoul. Him and Lilia getting their passes scanned at the gate, him and Lilia walking down the jetbridge. Everyone else, Victor and Mila and Yakov, was flying from Moscow with the Olympic team. Victor hadn't needed to – Seoul was only an hour's hop from Fukuoka – but you had to assume that he'd wanted the full Olympic experience. Getting a blessing from the Patriarch and then cramming into a charter plane with hundreds of other people wearing the same jacket. How lame.

Yuri ached with jealousy every time he thought about it.

So it was just the two of them flying to Korea together, like some bizarre holiday in the middle of the competition season. Yuri flopped down into his window seat and tried not to think about it. At least it wasn't so bad sitting next to Lilia; she hardly took up any room at all. She buckled her seatbelt across her hipbones and nudged Yuri to do the same. Knees practically pressing against the seat in front of him, he grabbed for the in-flight magazine.

Oh shit. He ought to have guessed. The headline on the magazine was 'Grand Old Men of the Games.' And the picture was of Victor Nikiforov and Evgeni Plushenko, both of them with literally dozens of medals hung around their neck. They had their arms draped around each other's shoulders, and they were both grinning from ear to ear. There went his fantasy about the whole Yana Rudkovskaya thing. Probably she was the one who was jealous. Probably they got together for regular circlejerks to stroke each other's egos.

Yuri stuffed the magazine back into the seatpocket – front cover facing inwards – and sighed.

"Lilia Mikhailovna," he said, "I think I'm getting a headache."

Lilia reached into her bag and handed him a bottle of water.

"Yeah, but..."

Lilia dug into her bag again and got out a packet of pills. "Ibuprofen. Please check."

He took the packet and had to go through the whole rigmarole of reading the back of it, looking at the blister pack, looking at the two pills that he popped out into his hand, just to confirm that they were what Lilia had said they were, and what he meant to be swallowing. Because god forbid he should somehow take a banned drug by mistake – as if Lilia carried around human growth hormone in her Ferragamo bag, what a joke – and get busted for doping when he wasn't even _in_ the Olympics.

"Ibuprofen," he confirmed wearily. He swallowed the pills dry and chased them with a few gulps of water. Then he handed the bottle back to Lilia.

"If you have a headache coming on," she said, "you should drink the whole thing."

Yuri ignored her. He queued up his Olympic Hell playlist – first track, 'Holiday in Cambodia' – pressed play, and closed his eyes as the plane roared down the runway.

***

While every other moron on the plane was busy stuffing their faces or staring slack-jawed at the latest Hollywood blockbuster, Yuri Plisetsky had his nose pressed to the window. Hoodie pulled up to block out the light of the glowing 'no smoking' signs, he was watching as the aurora borealis arched and twisted halfway across the sky. It was like the light of an unearthly first dawn. He never got tired of seeing it, and he rarely got to see it beyond the city lights of Piter.

"Yuratchka," said Lilia. "You must eat."

Yuri glanced down at whatever mystery beef Aeroflot had favored them with this time. He was honestly surprised that she hadn't insisted they pack their own food.

"But it's so beautiful," he said. 

He knew that Lilia was a sucker for beauty, which made it even more bizarre and inexplicable that she had ended up with Yakov. Going on pure aesthetics, you could almost understand why she might fall for – or at least fall into bed with – an asshole like Sergei Litsitsyn. But Yakov? Some things were clearly meant to remain mysteries.

"Ah," said Lilia. 

Anyone else would have considered this a flat refusal, but Yuri knew her better by now. "There's more to life than skating. You said so yourself last week, when you were trying to get me to read _Crime and Punishment_."

"I did," allowed Lilia. She paused. "If it's that beautiful, perhaps you ought to trade seats with me in a few minutes, so that I can admire it too. While I'm doing that, you can eat your dinner."

He'd been outplayed by a master. There was no shame in that. Next to Lilia, he was still in juniors.

"All right," he said, putting a little sulky reluctance into his voice to show that he couldn't be pushed around so easily. Which was a crock because he just had been.

He certainly wasn't happy about having to eat his mystery beef, which brought Aeroflot's in-flight catering to new lows. He picked at it, trying to do just enough to hold up his side of the bargain. Meanwhile Lilia was doing a better job of holding up her side. She seemed authentically transfixed, gazing out the window almost as intently as he had done.

When she finally looked back at him, she was smiling.

"See?" he said. "I told you it was good."

"When I was a girl," said Lilia Baranovskaya, "hardly older than you are now, they sent me on tour in Siberia, rather than abroad as I had hoped. We spent three nights performing in Yakutsk, where it was 40 degrees below. Every night sold out, naturally. And every night, after I had finished performing, I stepped out of the stage door to find myself beneath the most beautiful auroras I've ever seen. It made me feel entirely inadequate, that people had stood in line for hours to see me when they could have been looking up at the sky. Whenever I find myself tempted to become complacent about my abilities as an artist, I think of those auroras."

It was, thought Yuri, just slightly trite. Not to mention entirely unnecessary.

"I don't need an aurora," he said. "I have Victor."

" _As an artist,_ I said. Not as an athlete."

"Yeah," said Yuri. "Can I have the window seat back now?"

"Finish your dinner first," said Lilia.

It was only later, after he'd finished his marginally less awful dessert and they'd traded seats again, that Yuri really thought about what Lilia had said. _As an artist._ He glanced over at her but she was now fast asleep, her chin tilted upwards, showing the prominent tendons of her neck.

_As an artist. Does she think I'm a better artist than Victor? Was that what she meant?_

He pondered the question until the aurora had faded from the sky, and came to no firm conclusion.

***

About the only consolation of being an alternate was that he got to have his own hotel room – and, unlike the Olympic village, it had cable. If Russia had sent two men for the singles skating, he probably would have had to share a room with Victor, which would have been a disaster on so many levels. Probably it would have solved the FSFR's dilemma, because only one of them would have made it out alive.

Being in Pyongchang – or, specifically, in Gangneung – was so weird, a holiday that wasn't a holiday. Even if he wasn't competing in the Olympics, he had Worlds in a month and so he was expected to be training full time. Yakov had found a random local rink somewhere, which meant that Yuri had two hours a day to go through the motions. (Yakov had said he should consider himself lucky to have that much ice time, getting it had been like pulling teeth.) Apart from that, it was off-ice training with Lilia in this little gym that was actually a _taekwondo_ studio, plus catching up with his homework for the Unified State Exam.

Learning _taekwondo_ probably would have been a better use of his time. It was all so pointless. He wondered sometimes why he was even bothering.

***

Just like in Sochi, the figure skating started with the team event. This was clearly wishful thinking on the IOC's part, because anyone who tried to claim that figure skating could be a team sport was the biggest bullshitter ever. Pairs skaters somehow mostly managed to put up with each other, but Yuri had seen way too many people getting slashed by a stray blade mid-spin to think that it was easy. You had to wonder whether it was always accidental, you really did.

(At one point Yuri had been growing so fast that he'd wondered whether they would try to make him switch to pairs. He wouldn't have done it. He would have just quit.)

But however you felt about it, the team event was an event, and there were medals to be won, so who really cared? It certainly wouldn't have stopped Yuri from competing. If he'd been selected for the Olympics, he would have skated it loyally and done all of his bitching in private.

As it was he got to listen to Mila bitching instead. She'd made the Olympic team, one of Russia's full slate of three ladies, but she hadn't been chosen for the team event. Her first week and a half at the Olympics was just as free as his was.

So, the day after the Opening Ceremony, they met up in a café in Gangneung. Mila looked tired even though the ceremony hadn't been all that late at night. Her skin was very pale against her freshly-dyed red hair. At the last Olympics, in Sochi, she had been sixteen and had won gold. Now she was twenty and was already complaining about being past it.

"All these fucking kids," she said, taking a sip of the hot chocolate that she wasn't strictly meant to be drinking.

Yuri snapped a picture of her before she could wipe the mustache of froth from her upper lip. She stuck her tongue out at him but she didn't make him delete it. Yuri tucked his phone away. He could think up a caption for it later.

"You never said that when I was fifteen," he said.

"Yeah, well, I was a teenager then too. And Trusova's girls are ridiculous."

Tamara Trusova was fielding two minuscule fifteen-year-old girls who just about came up to the flag patch on Yuri's shoulder – and both of them had inexplicably had been chosen for the team competition over Mila. Yuri refused to believe that he had ever been that small, or that anyone that small could actually be serious competition at the Olympics.

"Who knows," he offered by way of consolation, "maybe the FSFR are all into fifteen-year-olds."

Not that it would have occurred to him to say that when he was fifteen. Back then he'd thought that the FSFR was biassed against the young. And who was he kidding? He still did.

Mila huffed with laughter. "Maybe they are." She paused, looking more serious. "This whole thing is so unfair, Yura. If I don't get to skate in the team competition, that's one thing, but... I'm sorry, you know?"

"Yeah, I know. I know."

He didn't want to talk about it. They'd spent days not talking about it in Piter, before Mila headed off to Moscow for the pre-Olympics preparations. He knew she was on his side but the last thing he wanted was more awkward sympathy. They didn't have that sort of conversation. They made fun of each other; they stuck gross things in each other's lockers; and, now that he was tall, he lifted Mila up into the air when she wasn't expecting it. That was always satisfying.

He couldn't help but remember Sochi, 2014, when Victor, Mila and Georgi had all gone off to the Games and left him behind. He'd been thirteen, just barely in juniors. All three of them had seemed Olympian in every sense of the world, grown adults and worldly-wise, even though Mila had been only sixteen.

 _It'll be me next time,_ he'd told himself. _That'll be me, I'll be going to the Olympics in 2018._

Back then it had seemed like it would be a whole lifetime away. He'd only half believed it, much though he'd repeated it to himself, but now it turned out that he hadn't needed to believe it. He might be here in Pyeongchang but he wasn't going to the Olympics after all.

"Fuck," he said feelingly. 

Mila just nodded. "You should have some more hot chocolate."

It was only a small consolation, but he did what she said and ordered another big mug. They sat there together in the café, surrounded by excited, chattering Olympics fans, and scrolled through their phones to see what was going on.

Some skiier had fallen in practice and somersaulted through about three layers of snow netting. (She was fine but the video was spectacular.) Lots of snowboarders were posing together on Instagram, looking like total dorks making peace signs in those baggy snowpants of theirs. The Russian hockey team was, unsurprisingly, owning everyone.

And the controversy over Victor's selection for the Olympics had been pushed out of the headlines by the controversy over Victor's fashion sense.

Most of the pictures of Victor at practice weren't making it into the Russian press – only onto social media – because he was wearing Yuri's old Team Japan jacket whenever Yakov wasn't immediately present to rip it off his shoulders. The Figure Skating Federation of Russia had submitted complaint after complaint, and the sponsors were kicking up a massive fuss, but Yuri guessed that Victor had just told them to go fuck themselves. It wasn't as if he was going to carry on skating competitively after this, whatever happened. (Surely he wasn't...?) It would have been funny if it hadn't been so completely and stereotypically Victor.

"Well," said Mila finally, stretching out her legs and sighing, "I'd better go. I have practice this afternoon."

"So do I. God knows why."

"Worlds," said Mila. "Only a month to go."

"Worlds can get fucked."

She laughed. In the door, on the way out, she got buttonholed by a couple of fans who wanted selfies – and to tell her how none of Trusova's skaters had a real lutz, like she didn't know that already.

Yuri gave her a little wave and slipped quietly away.

***

Mila might not have been in the team event, but there was plenty of Victor. Since he was Russia's only male singles skater, he was skating both the short program and the free program. Naturally the press, and Victor's fans, were having conniptions over this. Was the FSFR crazy? Did they expect him to bury himself for the Russian team and then go back and do it all again in the individual competition? Had everyone forgotten that he'd had spinal surgery a year and a half earlier? Did they think he was superhuman?

Other people pointed out that he didn't have to be superhuman. He only had to be better than Yuri Plisetsky. 'Seventeenth at Worlds' Yuri Plisetsky, who'd come in fifth two years in a row at Europeans and had ensured that Russia could only send one man to the Games. Victor had no choice but to skate both programs, because Yuri Plisetsky hadn't given him one. Did anyone see him complaining about this?

He was Victor fucking Nikiforov, after all. Get gold or die trying.

Yuri scrolled through it all, feeling a little pang whenever he saw his own name. Cheap and easy masochism. It wasn't like it was anything he hadn't seen before, and what else was he meant to do with himself in the evenings? Watch the hockey?

He was relieved when the team competition started. However much he had dreaded it, it would be far better to watch it than to watch people talking about it.

***

"He does triple axels to _warm up_ ," said John on Eurosport at the beginning of the short program. "You see him in practice, he just comes out on the ice in his sweats and jumps."

Even after more than a decade of Victor, he still sounded vaguely disbelieving.

There were two classes of male skaters at the Olympics: the guys who could land the quads and the guys who couldn't. Victor was the Guy Who Could, the prototype, the original. There were a lot of people he didn't even have to worry about.

But the thing about being the first was that it meant there were other people coming up behind you. Aside from the flip, J.J. now also had the full arsenal. His little brother Paul-Henri wasn't far behind. Guang Hong, a late bloomer, had upped his technical difficulty in the last couple of years and now had a clutch of his own quads.

Yuri had been one of those guys too, with a quad toe loop and a quad salchow under his belt by the time he was fifteen. He'd _taught_ Katsuki to land a quad sal reliably, for God's sake. Only then he'd started growing and even his triple axel had gone to shit.

He still _was_ one of those guys, he thought angrily, eating some weird Korean spicy dried squid snack while he watched the short program in his hotel room with the curtains pulled against a dim, drizzly afternoon. 

He still had his toe loop and his salchow, didn't he? He'd spent ages dicking around with a quad flip in the harness and then abandoned it because he got tired of watching Victor and Katsuki land them without even trying. People kept saying online that it was _their jump_ – they were the only two people who had landed it in competition – and in the end he concluded that they'd just made him allergic to it.

His quad lutz, though. He'd started working on it seriously with Yakov over the summer in the Dolomites. Maybe it had been the change of scene, maybe it had been the altitude – he still thought there was something in that, whatever Yakov might say – or maybe it had been the new power he was able to put into his jumps, but he'd actually started landing it once in a while.

Only just out of the harness with it, he hadn't brought it to Nationals. He'd been saving it for the Olympics. Stupid.

But even without Yuri in the mix, Victor was up against plenty of other people who had their own quad lutz, their own quad loop, their own quad combinations. He wasn't the only one anymore. He couldn't rest on his laurels. In particular Canada was breathing down Russia's neck in the team competition, with Victor up against a Leroy brother in each program. It was such delicious _schadenfreude_.

Yuri stuffed more squid into his mouth – it wasn't so bad once you got used to it – and watched as Victor came second to Paul-Henri Leroy. Second by quite a way, since he'd fallen on his quad loop and Paul-Henri had landed his.

It was the sort of thing that Yuri ought to have felt glad about – and he did, just a little, but not entirely. Since Yuri defeated him at Nationals, Victor had clearly spent some time standing in front of a mirror and practicing his _I'm satisfied with coming in second_ face, but there was still something faintly embarassing about it. Yuri couldn't quite bring himself to look head-on at Victor sitting with Yakov in the Kiss and Cry. He glanced at the TV out of the corner of his eye, picking at his remaining squid with chili-dusted fingers. (It was probably full of protein.) On Eurosport, Georgi sounded equally awkward, saying 'there's still room for him to come back in the Free,' like he'd forgotten it was a team competition or something.

It would have been different, thought Yuri, if he had defeated Victor himself. But seeing him lose to Paul-Henri Leroy was just pathetic.

***

Yuri went to the rink to watch the free program in person. Tickets were like gold dust – being an alternate got you nothing – but Yakov had somehow managed to wangle an accreditation for him from the Russian team. Assistant junior skate-licker to Victor Nikiforov. Something like that.

He briefly considered saying no, but the only thing lamer than getting to the competition on some fake team accreditation was flying all the way to Korea and not getting to see the Olympics at all. So he went.

It wasn't like he even got a seat. He got to stand crammed into a corner of the gangway with a bunch of other hangers-on, having to crane his neck to see a corner of the ice. Because he wasn't wearing skates, it was even more difficult to see than usual. Ironically he ended up standing next to Katsuki, who was in limbo for this event because he was nothing on the Russian team, even if he was technically Victor's coach. They eyed each other awkwardly out of the corner of the eye through the whole of the warmup, neither wanting to be the first to speak. 

"This is so fucked, isn't it?" said Yuri finally.

He didn't even know what he meant. The fact that they had nothing to say to each other; the fact that Victor was competing in the Olympics at thirty with a shattered back; the fact that the two of them were there only as hangers-on; all of it.

Katsuki was still staring fixedly out towards the rink. Yuri didn't think he could even see any of the ice, only the screen above. He was five centimetres shorter than Yuri now. 

"He only wants one more victory," said Katsuki without looking at him. "Can't you let him have that?"

"I can't _stop_ him having it," said Yuri, his frustration boiling over. "I fucking tried."

"You could be happy for him now. It doesn't cost you anything."

"Do you think _he'd_ be happy for _me_?"

"Yes. I do. Actually."

 _Bullshit,_ thought Yuri. _Such fucking bullshit._

But he didn't say it aloud, because a hush had descended over the thousands of spectators. Victor Nikiforov had taken the ice, ready to make history once again and to bring Russia home to gold.

Whatever you might say about Trusova's girls, they were amazing skaters. Almost certainly better than Mila, however disloyal it might be to even think that. Both of them had triple axels and both of them had managed to land them. The pairs skaters and the ice dancers had done well too. (Whatever that meant. God only knew how male pairs skaters could feel so proud of themselves for cleanly landing a triple lutz at the Olympics.)

What all of that meant was that Russia was seven points ahead with only Victor left to skate. Practically all he had to do was step onto the ice, wave at the audience and do a few victory laps. And that was practically all that he did do.

With his restricted view, Yuri could see him only in short glimpses – the curve of an arm, a silver head gliding past. One jump where he got enough height to be visible in full, the sudden flash of sequins and the dark imperial purple of his costume. Apart from that, Yuri had to watch Victor's skate on the big screen above the rink. It was strangely fitting, as if this larger-than-life projection were the Victor who mattered, with the real man below no more than an afterthought.

Victor skated a program that was precisely and ruthlessly calculated to win gold for Russia – no less and no more. It opened with his quad flip, landed cleanly and received with applause so rapturous that it briefly drowned out the music. After that, in close succession, came an immaculate triple axel. (And why shouldn't it have been? Victor could land triple axels in his sleep.)

After a step sequence and a spin, he managed a quad toe - triple toe combination. Beside him, Yuri could sense Katsuki letting out a long-held breath. 

And then the clockwork began to wind down. The final three jumps were a double salchow, a double loop and a double axel. All planned, or so it seemed, but Yuri hadn't seen Victor voluntarily jump a double in competition since... ever. It was like watching an exhibition program, which in a sense it was. Yuri could imagine Victor and Yakov sitting down with the ISU Code of Points and a calculator, recutting his choreography to fit the points needed.

Waving to the crowd afterwards, Victor looked both relieved and faintly embarrassed. And so he ought to be. Yuri couldn't help feeling like he'd been a witness to some sort of obscure con. Only Victor could manage to throw an event by winning it.

On the big screen, Yuri watched as Victor launched himself into the Kiss and Cry, into the heart of the overexcited Russian team. Hugs and smiles and waves and congratulations all round. No one seemed remotely inclined to shake him and say 'what the fuck was that?' Even Victor himself seemed to have recovered his joy in the midst of all that adulation.

Gold was gold, Yuri supposed, however you'd won it.

Barely a couple of minutes later, Victor launched himself out of the Kiss and Cry again, into Katsuki's arms. He hadn't noticed Yuri standing next to him, naturally. Thankfully.

On the other hand, Katsuki clearly remembered. After extricating himself from a passionate kiss – with tongue, not that Yuri had wanted to notice that – he glanced at Yuri over Victor's shoulder. You could just about see the thought bubble over his head: _aren't you going to come over and congratulate him now?_

Yuri didn't congratulate Victor. He turned his back on both of them and walked away.

***

Making his way out of the building afterwards, he crossed paths with one of Trusova's girls in the hallway. She was still wearing her gold medal, and it looked so heavy on her little neck that he half expected her to see her body bent with the weight of it. She looked up at him – a long way up – as she passed and blinked once in surprise, like she hadn't expected to see him there.

That slight pause was enough to give him an idea. He laid a hand on her shoulder.

"You're going to start growing," he said. "Sooner than you think. It fucks you up."

She looked up at him in horror, as if he were the evil fairy godmother at the christening, imparting his curse. When really he just wanted to warn her.

Coming along the hall in her wake, Tamara Trusova gave him a dirty look, grabbed the girl's elbow and led her away again.

"I just thought you ought to know," mumbled Yuri in the direction of her receding back.

About half an hour later he had Yakov bitching at him about how Tamara had said that he'd been trying to intimidate one of her skaters, _even though_ – and this was the real burn – _he wasn't even competing._

An hour later he was sitting back in his hotel room reading through the news on his phone.

The press loved the photos of Trusova's girls with Victor, Russia's future and Russia's past all together in one adorable, photogenic bundle. As he scrolled through them, Yuri felt like the awkward stepchild, the half-brother left out of all the family pictures, the might-have-been. The only gratifying thing was how fucking ancient Victor looked next to them. All his fancy moisturisers, all that witches' brew of chemical peels and potions, were useless next to the dewy complexion of actual youth.

As for the interviews, Yuri wished he'd never watched them.

"What do you say to your doubters," asked one reporter, "and to the people who never thought you could skate like this at the Olympics at thirty?"

"Thank you very much," said Victor.

And he smiled. Viciously.

***

Next morning at 11 am, just after the team leaders meeting, would be the draw for the individual event. All the competitors would be there; everyone would be there. Everyone except for Yuri. It would be the final confirmation that he wasn't invited to the party, that there was no hope left.

He went for a walk instead.

It might have been snowy up in the mountains, but down by the coast in Gangneung it was cloudy and drizzly, well above freezing. Yuri zipped his dubiously waterproof jacket up to his chin and mentally took back everything insulting he'd said about Boston or Helsinki. Piles of snow were one thing, but this raw, wet cold was just dismal. On the other hand, it seemed a suitable accompaniment for his mood. He wandered aimlessly through the town, kicking his way through puddles, the canvas of his shoes dampening with each step (he'd only really meant to wear them around the hotel).

Eventually he found himself by the sea, like it had drawn him there. It wasn't anything like the other seasides he had known: just a quiet road and a path by the water, lined with scrubby pine trees. But the sea itself was the same everywhere, salt and infinite, and the seagulls were crying.

It made him think of Saint Petersburg. It made him think of Hasetsu's ocean. It made him think of walking by the seawall early one morning in Barcelona. All he'd wanted that morning was to chill out and look at the water, to think about anything other than the Grand Prix Final. Instead he'd run into Victor. It was like the story of his life.

If he'd known then what he knew now, what would he have done? He could have quit right after winning the Grand Prix Final, told Yakov that he was finished and he wasn't changing his mind. It would have saved two years of pain and frustration and fruitless effort, and everyone would have wondered why. For years afterwards they would be talking about him, the fifteen-year-old who'd had the world at his feet. They would have thought that he'd sold his soul to the devil for one victory and then had the bargain called in prematurely. They wouldn't have been too far wrong.

And yet he wasn't sure that he would have wanted that ending. Maybe he was just too much of a competitor. He had wanted to go out fighting – only Victor had stolen even that possibility away from him.

 _I could quit *now*, if I wanted,_ he thought, leaning against an anonymous, twisted pine tree. _I don't have to compete at Worlds. I don't ever have to skate again._

It broke upon him like it was an utterly new idea. It wasn't that anyone was _making_ him skate: he'd skated as long as he could remember, he'd never thought of doing anything else. No one had asked him whether he wanted to do it or not. If anyone had tried, he would have laughed in their face, he would have thought it was a ridiculous question. All his life had been skating, as natural and inevitable as breathing.

Yuri Plisetsky stood by the shore of the Sea of Japan and asked himself whether he wanted to keep breathing.

It felt treasonous even wondering. No one knew that he was thinking about quitting, no one even suspected it. His face, wet with the mist from the sea, was flushed with a strange exaltation. His phone was buzzing in his pocket, but he ignored it. His heart was pounding in his chest.

"Fuck them," he said, experimentally. "Fuck it all."

His voice sounded a little hollow against noise of the surf and the wind. A seagull regarded him curiously out of one eye, hopped a little bit towards him in a spirit of hope. Even it didn't look impressed.

"I'm quitting," he continued, trying to inject a little more conviction into his voice. "There's nothing you can do about it. I refuse to participate in this fucking farce anymore. I'm done."

Yakov would scream and shout but he couldn't do anything about it. Lilia would just look at him, an edge of sadness in her face.

"If you're certain," she would say, slowly and carefully, and she would mean it. "If that's what you want."

But oh God, oh God, oh God – he didn't. He didn't want it at all.

Even though he was just off the path, his feet in the dirt, standing right next to a flat, sandy beach, he felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a precipice. He took an involuntary step backwards, onto the safety of the wet asphalt, and drew in a sharp breath. The air smelled like salt and pine and seaweed.

 _I'm quitting._ He might say it to the seagulls, he might even imagine saying it to the world. It was true that it would be a 'fuck you' of monumental proportions, but it would be foolish to quit just to spite the world, because it cared less than he did. Because he cared more than he could ever admit to himself.

It was nothing to do with all those bullshit inspirational slogans about winners never quitting and pain making you stronger. If that was all it was, Yuri would have quit in a heartbeat. Maybe football or biathlon built character, he didn't really know. Figure skating, in his experience, built weirdo assholes; he counted himself as one of them. And all of them skated for the same reason Yuri did: because they couldn't help it, because they had to, because they couldn't imagine doing anything else. Even a broken back hadn't been enough to stop Victor from competing. Yuri might have thought it was crazy but when it came down to it, he could identify. 

But he couldn't think about this anymore. It was too fucked. Instead, to distract himself, he looked at his phone: three missed calls from Yakov, which was weird because Yakov ought to have been busy at the draw. Yuri called him right back; Yakov answered pretty much instantly. 

"Idiot boy! Why weren't you picking up?"

"I'm fine, I just went for a walk. I'll be back in time for practice. It's not like you need to get hold of me or anything."

"How do you know that?!" roared Yakov, his voice paled into tinniness coming out of the speaker of an iPhone.

Yuri held it a little way from his ear. "What do you mean, Yakov? What is there to talk about?"

He felt a weird giddy flutter in his stomach, like a premonition coming almost too late to be any use. He glanced at his notifications. There were hundreds. Hundreds. For a second he wondered, as insane as it was, whether someone had overheard him telling the seagulls that he was quitting. 

"Victor pulled out of the individual competition at the team leaders meeting! Have you not seen the news? He pulled out! Which means that your name is going into the draw! You're skating your short program on Friday!"

Yuri held his phone out at arm's length, stared at it against the backdrop of the sea. Yakov's voice was still coming out of the phone, going on and on. _Victor's back... last minute substitution... he had to leave it until just before... such a drama queen... my heart can't take any more of this..._

Yuri wasn't sure his heart could take it either. His mind was full of questions for Yakov, only on reflection most of them turned out to be variations on ' _what the fuck?_ '

"Huh?" he said instead.

"Yuratchka, have you been listening to a word I've been saying?! The IOC signed off on the substitution! You are an Olympian now! You will be competing in two days!"

"Yeah, Yakov. I heard you the first time."

Silently, still holding his phone, Yuri started jumping up and down on the gritty, sanded concrete of the sea path, as high as he possibly could. He jumped and jumped until he was breathing hard, the cold air biting at his windpipe and at his lungs. Then he jumped some more.

When Yuri finally put the phone back to his ear, Yakov was still shouting. He sounded like he was on the verge of an aneurysm.

"What the hell are you doing there? Is that all you're going to say to your coach?! Did you understand me? Do you have any questions?"

"Uh," said Yuri. "Yeah."

Still foremost in his mind was the main question – _what the actual fuck?_ – but he couldn't exactly ask Yakov this. And there was one other important question nagging at him.

"Is Victor OK? Like, is he in the hospital or something?"

Victor was not in the hospital. So said Yakov. 

Apparently his back had been bothering him ever since the team competition. He'd thought that he could manage the individual competition, but after yesterday's practice it had become clear that he couldn't. So he'd made the only sensible decision (had Victor been replaced by a space alien?, wondered Yuri) and pulled out.

"But of course he had to wait until the last minute," Yakov concluded, "just in case he was miraculously healed overnight! Which means that you have twenty minutes to get to the draw! I'm sending someone to come and get you. Where the hell are you anyway?"

Yuri looked around him. "Uh, I'm, like, next to the ocean or something."

It wasn't that he was trying to be difficult. It was just that it was taking a while to sink in. 

After he'd looked at the map on his phone and given Yakov the address it displayed, it still hadn't sunk in. He stood around in the cold for ten minutes waiting for someone to arrive, but felt no closer to enlightenment. He was picked up by some grouchy assistant coach from Moscow with better things to do, and driven at high speed through the streets of Gangneung, still thinking _surely this isn't happening_.

Yuri was hustled into the draw with literally seconds to spare before it started – if, indeed, they hadn't actually been waiting for him. He wasn't even wearing an Olympic team jacket yet, just the regular hoodie he'd put on that morning. Everyone stared.

He sat down next to Paul-Henri, the only seat that was free. It figured that no one else had wanted to sit there.

"Don't act like you haven't fucking seen me before," muttered Yuri out of the corner of his mouth.

When they called his name, he went up and took his number just like he always did. He would be skating fifth, in the fifth group. At the Olympics.

 _What the fuck?_ thought Yuri Plisetsky.

***

After the draw, the Olympic machinery whirled into action around him, as sharp and rapid and precise as Lilia's knitting needles. Someone whisked him away to get his credentials and, all of a sudden, the gates of the Olympic village were open to him. It was like getting an all-access pass to Disneyworld, or so he imagined (he'd never been). There were free hairdressers, there was a dentist, there was a gym the length of a football field. There was an absolutely massive cafeteria, where you could help yourself to whatever you wanted with just a flash of your credentials, where athletes were actually wandering around with their medals hanging around their necks like they'd just stepped down from the podium.

They hadn't, of course. The ugly but very obvious truth of the Olympic village was that it was much easier to get laid if you had a medal. People were into fucking medals, and not even in the Christophe-Giacometti-at-Torino sense.

Yuri didn't give a shit about any of that. He had things to do.

The athletes' directory – to which he now had access – told him where to find Victor's room. Eleventh floor, blue wing, room 1104. Having tracked it down, Yuri studied the door, then gave it a few good kicks. It trembled on its hinges; he could probably have actually kicked it in if he'd cared less about the state of his knees and ankles. The thing was probably made out of cardboard.

Before Yuri could ponder this any further, the door opened. Victor stared out at him, his hair a little bit messy, wearing his Team Japan jacket over an anonymous T-shirt and sweats.

He smiled a little lopsidedly. "Of course it's you! No one else kicks the door instead of knocking. I knew you'd turn up eventually."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" demanded Yuri.

"Didn't Yakov tell you? My back is..."

"Really? _Really?_ "

Yuri didn't enter the room so much as advance on Victor while he took a few steps backwards. He might still be a couple centimeters shorter than Victor, but he was still tall enough to stare into his eyes. Of course Victor wasn't the slightest bit intimidated. 

"You saw my free skate. It's been bothering me for days. That was all I could do. Thankfully it was enough for gold."

It was the sort of meaningless fluff that he would have offered to Match TV or Izvestia – and had in fact been offering already. Yuri was lucky to have caught him in his room after a first round of interviews with the press.

"You knew it was going to be enough. You planned it to be enough! What's going on with you, anyway?" Yuri looked down suspiciously at Victor's feet. He was wearing cashmere bedsocks, pale purple, just a little loose. "Why did you withdraw? You don't actually look paralyzed."

Instead of answering, Victor wiggled his toes, a cheeky, artistic flourish. "Thankfully not!"

They looked up from Victor's feet at the same moment and looked at at each other instead. Yuri thought that he might spend the rest of his life staring into Victor's icy blue eyes, because neither of them was going to blink. Impasse. 

"Because I couldn't have skated the way I wanted to skate," said Victor carefully, finally. A delicate climbdown, thought Yuri. "Because I knew it was better to step back too soon, rather than too late. I got my gold, after all."

" _I knew it was better_? What the hell, Victor? Did you come up with that yourself?"

"No! Yuuri did. But he's right, isn't he?"

The delayed realisation hit Yuri then. Too late – possibly weeks too late, if not months. _He just wanted one more gold. That was all he ever wanted. And he knew it from the start._

He felt like he was going to be sick all over Victor's cashmere socks.

"You fucker. You absolute fucker! You planned this whole thing with Katsuki and Yakov, didn't you?? The withdrawal, the, the... everything. How long have you known you were going to do this? Why the fuck didn't you tell me?"

Victor gave Yuri an exaggeratedly innocent look. "Of course I didn't plan it. That would be collusion, wouldn't it? The FSFR would have had my head. You're only allowed to withdraw for reasons of injury. How could I have known in advance that I would be injured?"

"You have fucking screws in your back, Victor! You had to qualify in secret because you weren't well enough to skate at Europeans!"

Victor ignored him. "Besides which, how would I have known how the team event was going to go? We might have bombed. Or I might have felt fine afterwards. Do you really think that I would have pulled out if I thought I could win another gold? You have no idea how many painkillers I've been taking."

"I don't believe you," said Yuri, a statement of exasperation and skepticism all at once. "I don't _believe_ you!"

Victor shrugged. "You don't have to skate if you don't want to. I'm sure the FSFR will call Sasha Velikov if you say no."

Yuri was half tempted to say _get fucked, I don't want your sloppy seconds._ Except that he wanted them desperately, more than he'd wanted anything in his life.

"Of course I want to skate, you asshole. You could have given me more than two days notice, that's all!"

Victor shrugged. "I couldn't. That's all. You can take it or leave it."

He might be taking it, but Victor couldn't make him like it. On top of all of this, he had the feeling that there was yet another grudge he was holding against Victor. What was it? Oh yes.

"And you took all my Olympic endorsements!" 

For a moment Victor looked thoughtful. Then he brushed it away, as he always did. "Oh. Yes, well. You'll have plenty of endorsements afterwards."

_Not if I fuck this up!_

Thankfully Yuri managed to bite his tongue just before he said this. It would have been losing the war to win a battle. There was nothing else to say. If they kept at it, someone was going to end up getting punched in the face. 

Yuri looked away from Victor. He found himself staring at the second bed in the room. It was empty, the blue Pyeongchang 2018 bedspread pulled so tightly that it was clear it had never been slept in at all.

"Can you believe that they wouldn't let Yuuri stay with me?" asked Victor, following Yuri's gaze.

"You idiot," said Yuri. "Of course they didn't let him stay! This is the Olympic village! Even Yakov can't get in without an invitation!"

"But still, they could have made an exception."

It was Victor down to the ground: his whole life had been a series of exceptions. But that stopped now. Yuri went over to the second bed and stretched out on it proprietorially. 

Victor raised an eyebrow at him. "Are you staying?"

Yuri played his trump card. He held up the keycard that he could have used instead of kicking the door.

"This is my room too. Everyone else already has a roommate."

***

Within the hour Victor had packed up his stuff and moved out to stay with Katsuki in a luxury hotel in Seoul. So Yuri had Victor's room (he couldn't help thinking of it that way) all to himself. It wasn't exactly the best environment in which to prepare for his short program. It still smelled like Victor's cologne and he kept on finding annoyingly distinctive silver hairs stuck to the bottom of his socks. 

He lay in bed that night with the duvet pulled up to his chin, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness. This was the one that had been Victor's bed; he was sleeping in Victor's bed. It said it all. He turned over, thinking that he could still feel the warmth in his sheets, the hollow left by Victor's body. He jerked off angrily and then went to sleep.

***

After days of solitary practice at the random rink Yakov had found in Gangneung, it was strange suddenly being in the midst of the official Olympic practice sessions. During the off-ice warmups people kept coming up to him to say _congratulations_ or _welcome_ or just to send the message _hey, I noticed you're here now._

Otabek gave him a thumbs up from across the room as soon as he walked in. It was quite possibly the best thumbs up Yuri had ever gotten. J.J. and Paul-Henri came over to see him together, like they needed backup just to give him a grudging hello.

"You got your quad lutz yet?" asked Paul-Henri. "I saw you in the harness on Instagram."

"Wouldn't you like to know," said Yuri. Then he stared hard at them both until they went away again.

Kenjirou Minami came to greet him too, as short and irrepressibly bubbly as ever. At least he didn't have his hair dyed those horrible colors anymore, just a few blond highlights in an overall dark brown.

"Hello, old rival!" said Kenjirou. Like they'd ever been anything of the sort. Yuri had crushed him in competition after competition in juniors and gone on beating him in seniors, except for that one disastrous time at Worlds. "It'll be an honor to skate against you again! Please do your best!"

"Yeah, thanks," said Yuri noncommittally. He'd watched enough anime to know that something was getting lost in translation. He knew he was meant to say _I'll do my best_ in reply or something, but they were at the Olympics for god's sake, couldn't they both take that for granted?

Kenjirou just kept looking at him expectantly, a tight little grin on his face. "I was so happy to hear that you'd be skating!" he added.

"Thanks," said Yuri again. Oh hell, what did he have to lose? He just hoped his pronunciation was decent. " _Ganbatte_."

Kenjirou positively glowed. "I will do my best!" he said in response. Then he marched off to get back to his stretches.

He was still, Yuri noted, crazy flexible. But he couldn't land a quad salchow, so it all evened out.

***

Friday came quickly, too quickly. It was one thing getting to stay in the Olympic village and wear his Olympic team jacket. That was great. It was less great being tossed into the biggest competition of his life with barely two days notice – although perhaps there was some compensation in the fact that he'd had less time to get stressed about it.

Whatever, no matter how he felt about it, the day had arrived. Yuri Plisetsky was about to represent Russia at the Olympic Games in the men's singles skating.

 _It's just a competition,_ he kept telling himself as he changed into his costume and started his warmups. _You've done lots of competitions._ ( _And bombed lots of competitions,_ a little voice in his head added, but he chose to ignore it.)

He was skating in the fifth group, near the end of the competition. As usual, everything had been timed out for him down to the second: his arrival, his warmup, the moment he would go out to the rink, all of it. And yet it still seemed like an eternity standing there waiting for the competitor before him to finish. He stood there in the holding area backstage, wrapped up in his jacket to keep warm, earbuds stuck in his ears, windmilling his arms with surpressed nervous energy, wondering when the hell they'd let him go. If someone had told him that North Korea had just tested a new experimental weapon designed to slow down time, he would have entirely believed them.

He took one earbud out of his ear. "Yakov, has your watch stopped or something?"

In answer Yakov just gestured towards a television that was clearly showing the guy from the Czech Republic still on the ice.

"Oh," said Yuri. "Yeah."

He stuck the earbud back in his ear and went back to jumping up and down. Back when he'd still been at school, before he'd moved to Piter to train with Yakov, his teachers had always been yelling at him for jumping around at the wrong time, like during math class. One of the very good things about figure skating was that you could do this for entirely legitimate reasons. Like because you were warming up – and absolutely not at all because you were nervous.

Although the wait might have seemed an eternity, it still came as a complete shock when Yakov finally clapped him on the shoulder and gestured out towards the rink.

"You're on now. Good luck."

***

Emerging into the massive 12,000 seat arena and stepping out onto the ice felt almost uncanny. It was as if he'd been here before, as if he'd done this before. 

Taking a final turn around the rink, warming up again for the great effort to come, he was puzzled for a moment. Then, when he spread his arms to acknowledge the crowd, he remembered. He knew why. This was the prelude to his perfect skate at the Olympics. This was the story he'd created for himself.

None of the prelude had been like he'd imagined it. No torrid affair on Victor's part, no vengeful Plushenko – but all of that had been silly and didn't matter. The important parts were the same: Victor had been forced to withdraw, and Yuri had replaced him, and here he was on the ice at the Olympics. It was just like he'd imagined it, over and over again for weeks now, never expecting it to come true.

His head was spinning. He skated back to Yakov and blew his nose for the sake of something to do, because this was what he always did before he competed.

"I imagined it like this," he said to Yakov. "It was just like this."

"That's the point of doing it," said Yakov gruffly, putting his hand around Yuri's for an instant before taking the used tissue from him. "Now go!"

***

His skate wasn't perfect. Only a moron would have expected it to be like it had been in his imagination. But he landed his quad toe; he landed his triple axel; he landed his quad salchow with only the slightest bobble. His spins and his step sequences were solid. He had the deep edges that Oleg Petrovich had been hammering into him for months now.

He stepped off the ice still half stunned, trying to add up the score in his head and failing like he always did. He leaned in mechanically for the hug from Yakov, the hug from Lilia.

"That was good, wasn't it?" he asked, not trusting his own judgment, wanting an objective opinion. He was so exhausted that he couldn't think straight. "Was it good?"

"Very good, Yuratchka," said Yakov, from whom this was high praise indeed. He held Yuri for a heartbeat longer than normal before slapping him on the back and releasing him again. "That's how we wanted it."

He was so unsettled by not having messed up somehow that he nearly fell over trying to put his skateguards on.

They arranged themselves in the Kiss and Cry as they always did, Yakov on the right and Lilia on the left. Sitting the middle, Yuri was clutching a big bouquet of roses and yet another cat plushie. Lilia had her hand resting on his.

 _Fuck,_ he thought, _that really was good._ And then: _I'm at the Olympics. I'm at the Olympics and I didn't completely bomb. I actually owned it._

As the haze of adrenalin and oxygen debt began to fade from his system, all of it finally started to sink in. Or, to be more accurate, a feeling of giddy relief began to bubble up inside him. He could feel a big, stupid smile spreading across his face. He waved at the camera.

"Hi Grandad! Hi Ilya!" Who else did he have to say hello to? Everyone who mattered was here in Pyeongchang. After a moment's thought, laughing, he added: "Hey Vova!"

But the scores were up already. Yakov and Lilia were leaning forward to examine them on the screen, like they were some sort of fine art object that deserved loving scrutiny. Yuri leaned forward too. 115.72. His program components score was the best he'd ever gotten, and the total was less than 3 points off his personal best.

"Good boy," Lilia was saying. "Well done."

That was enough to put him into first. First at the Olympics. But his personal best was two years old, and it wasn't a world record anymore. Katsuki had taken that away from him. 

Before the final standings for the short program would be posted, there was one more group still to skate.

***

There was no resting on your laurels in figure skating until you actually had a medal hanging around your neck. Standing around backstage, Yuri went through a series of perfunctory stretches so that all his muscles didn't seize up, when all he really wanted to do was stare at the TV coverage and pray that all his rivals crashed and burned.

Guang Hong's score was posted while he was doing his hip flexor stretches. He looked up just a moment before the scores disappeared from the screen to see that he'd been beaten by 0.72 points. He bit back a swear. There were cameras and press everywhere and he knew very well that they were watching him.

"You can get that back in the free," said Yakov. 

Easy enough for Yakov to say; he could probably _just about_ score 0.72 on one jump himself, if he was having a really good day and his arthritis wasn't acting up.

The next two skaters were no-hopers, it didn't matter how they did. Yuri was starting to shiver with suppressed nerves and with the chill of the rink, but he couldn't just walk off to the mixed zone and the showers, because the guy skating next was J.J. Leroy. He jogged in place while J.J. took the ice in front of a roaring crowd. He had a bad feeling about this.

It turned out that his bad feeling was entirely justified. J.J. had loaded his program so heavily that it was almost insulting. Quad lutz - triple toe loop combination. Triple axel. And, the _coup de grâce_ , a quad loop. Yuri watched him land jump after jump, feeling the blood rushing to his chilled face until it burned with heat. And then he watched it all over again in the slow-motion replays. _J.J.'s fucking perfect Olympic skate_ – there was probably going to be an inspirational children's book written about it or something.

Yuri had a TV camera stuck right into his face. He knew perfectly well that they would be showing reaction shots of him interspersed with the footage of J.J. and his parents waiting for the scores in the Kiss and Cry. Everyone would be watching him as he watched his second place go up in smoke, trying to read the expression in his eyes. He was just inches from shoving the camera out of his face and telling them all to fuck off.

Yakov, perhaps sensing this, put a hand on his shoulder and led him away to a quiet corner. It wasn't like Yuri actually needed to see the scores. The writing was on the wall. He was going to take first by a mile, pushing Yuri down to third place.

"That fucker," said Yuri in an undertone. "That _fucker_. Couldn't he have put a hand down or something?"

Yakov didn't bother answering him. He knew it was a rhetorical question.

"You know that bronze at the Olympics was the best I ever did," he said instead.

Yuri was so not in the mood to hear stories about how Yakov had walked uphill both ways in the snow carrying a Soviet flag. "Yeah, yeah, and you were grateful to bring back bronze for the Motherland, I know how this talk goes."

Yakov let out an utterly unexpected snort of derision. "I wasn't remotely grateful, Yura, I was devastated! I still have nightmares about my short program and wake up apologizing to Oleg Petrovich. Ask Lilia!"

"Then what...?"

"I was twenty-six; I knew that it had been my last chance. You're seventeen, you're a boy. You'll see two more Olympic Games, if you decide to keep competing."

"Three," said Yuri instantly.

He wasn't about to let Victor get one up on him. Victor had been to four Olympics and medalled – whatever you might say about a team medal – in all of them.

"Three, then! I don't want you lying awake thinking that your life will be over if you don't win gold this time around, that's all I'm saying! Third place after the short program is very good! You ought to be pleased with yourself!"

Yakov was really shouting now. It was so hilarious, and so Yakov, to be delivering a massive telling-off to him right after he'd skated so much better than anyone had expected. If he'd messed up, Yakov would never have been shouting at him. Michele Crispino, who really _had_ messed up, gave Yuri an envious look over his shoulder while being led away by his coach.

"Yeah," said Yuri. "I'm thrilled. Whatever."

Deep down he actually _was_ pretty happy. Sure, he wished that J.J. would die in a fire, but he was at the Olympics, wasn't he? And he was within striking distance of second, wasn't he? What else could he have asked for?

"So I want you to have a smile on your face when you step into the mixed zone to talk to the press!"

Not to have to talk to the press. That was the other thing he would have asked for. But it couldn't be helped.

"And," added Yakov, "I don't want you to _mention_ Victor apart from saying that you hope he has a quick recovery from his injury!"

"But I..."

"I don't want to hear it, Yura! Not another word until you get out there and tell Channel One how grateful you are to the Figure Skating Federation of Russia for allowing you to compete!"

So he didn't say another word. He let Lilia straighten his jacket and fix his hair, and he went out into the mixed zone thinking _eat your heart out Victor Nikiforov_. If that didn't put a smile on his face, it certainly came pretty close.

*** 

In limbo, in parenthesis... the wait between the short program and the free skate was always excruciating. It was terrible if you'd done badly, knowing that you had to go out on the ice again in front of everyone; it was even more terrible if you'd done well, because then the pressure was even worse. So it felt when you'd done well, anyway.

Thankfully the IOC had scheduled the two skates almost back-to-back. By the time he finished with the press and got back to the Olympic village, it was already 4.30pm. Just enough time to shower, get a massage and eat dinner (he kept his earbuds in, everyone knew better than to try to talk to him) before going to his room and getting an early night. Because of the time zones – because of the American networks – the free skate was starting at 10am the next morning. He had a 6am call for the bus to practice. That was a normal hour for practice, but a 10am competition was completely and utterly fucked.

Naturally he couldn't sleep. He lay in bed trying to think it all through. He still didn't quite believe this was actually happening. However much you might imagine standing on the top step of the podium with the medal around your neck, listening to the stupid national anthem, you never imagined the bit where you polished your skates the night before, thinking _by this time tomorrow, it'll be all over. By this time tomorrow I'll know._

It was so terrible not being able to know _now_. You would have thought that not having expected to be able to compete in the first place might have helped. Maybe it had helped for the short program, but that initial glow had already dissipated. He didn't just want to _be_ at the Olympics; he wanted to fucking win. And if he didn't...

 _I'll move back to Lyubertsy,_ thought Yuri in spite. _I'll spend the rest of my life smoking weed with Volodya!_

He knew that he never would, and he didn't want to, but it was somehow reassuring to know that he _could_. He fell asleep imagining what it would be like, never again needing to set his alarm every night. It seemed even more remote and fictional than the thought of Olympic gold.

***

 _What do I have to lose?_ thought Yuri halfway through his free skate, going through the 3-turn as he wound up for another jump. In fact he had quite a bit to lose, but right now it didn't feel that way.

Whenever he'd imagined this free skate, he'd remembered what it had felt like at the Grand Prix Final when he was fifteen. Digging so deeply into himself that there was nothing left to give, until all that was left to hold him up was his anger and his desire. When the music had ended, he'd collapsed onto the ice, unable to fight back gasps for air that were more like sobs. He'd fallen on his first jump, but it had been enough. Offering up his whole body and soul in exchange for victory had been – just – enough.

Now, with three clean jumps behind him, he was about to transition from the slow first half of _Bohemian Rhapsody_ to its frenetic conclusion. It was a brutal program, choreographed by a masochist who clearly expected everyone to share his willingness to suffer for his art. Yuri could never have skated it at fifteen, even though he could have landed the jumps; his body would have run through all its reserves and, once that had happened, every ounce of will he possessed would have weighed nothing in the balance. But he was stronger now. He knew he was; he could feel it.

It was an astounding realization.

His next jump was meant to be a triple lutz - triple toe combination. For Victor and Katsuki, who could both land the quad consistently, nothing more than filler. And for Yuri? Well. That was the question.

He made the decision in the space between one heartbeat and the next. He came out of his three-turn, lined himself up on the glide, jammed his toepick into the ice and threw all his power down. Quad lutz or die trying. To his immense shock, he actually got the four full rotations. Even more, he landed it cleanly enough that he went for the triple toe combination without conscious thought. _That_ landing he bobbled, more from surprise than anything else. _What the fuck did I just do?_

After that the adrenalin rush was wild. You would have thought that doing your free skate at the Olympics would be enough to max out on adrenalin, but apparently not. He went through the rest of the program as if supercharged. His step sequence was a whirlwind, his triple axel was if anything overrotated, and he rocked the electric guitar solo like he was Brian May himself.

In the last moments of the program the music gentled again, trailing away back to the solo vocal and then the final notes of the piano. In his closing pose, Yuri was crouched and curled in upon himself, his face buried against the curve of his elbow, his hand cupping the back of his head.

_Nothing really matters, anyone can see. Nothing really matters to me..._

For a moment there was a stunned, total silence. Yuri, breathing into his elbow, heard nothing but the rush of blood through his body. It was as if he was flying, still not certain where he would land.

A heartbeat later came the thunderous applause. Yuri leapt to his feet and threw his arms in the air.

***

Just as Yuri was taking his skate guards from Yakov and stepping off the ice, Victor walked right up to him, beaming. It was like a haunting or something. It was just like those nightmares he'd had after Victor's injury, where Victor had just turned up and said _oh, that was all a mistake, I'm fine now! You didn't think that I'd actually pulled out, did you?_

Not that he was about to take the ice in his Burberry coat and Ferragamo shoes. Which made it even more of a mystery.

"What the fuck are you doing here?!" said Yuri.

"I'm your choreographer!" said Victor. "Why would I not be here?"

Hell, he'd completely forgotten. However many times he'd envisioned sitting with Yakov in the Kiss and Cry, waiting for the scores from his free skate, he'd never imagined Victor sitting on his other side, warm and vital and drawing hearts at the camera. But that was exactly what he got.

"That's how I meant it to be skated," Victor was saying. "I knew that you could do it!"

He put one arm proprietorially around Yuri's waist, then reached over with his other hand to take hold of Yuri's, awaiting the score as nervously as if it had been his own. Yuri squeezed back. Guang Hong had had a great skate – there was no catching him – but J.J. hadn't been so lucky. So there was a chance, a chance...

"You ought to have it," said Victor. "Your PCS is going to be huge."

Yuri wasn't so sure. His heart was pounding even harder than it had been on the ice. For a second, before he knew what he was doing, he hid his face against Victor's shoulder. Then he glanced at the screen.

His PCS was huge. His whole _score_ was huge. _216.38_. That was more than ten points above his personal best. That was... oh fuck, why couldn't he _add_ , he should have paid more attention to his math tutor.

"You've got it!" said Yakov a second before the total flashed up on the screen. _332.1_

He had it. It was his. A silver medal at the Olympic Games.

Yuri gasped. He pulled his hand from Victor's grasp and jumped to his feet, holding his arms out wide. A moment later both Yakov and Victor were on their feet too, burying him in a confused group embrace so tight that he could hardly breathe. Someone was half lifting him off his feet and he wasn't sure who. Maybe it was both of them at once.

He ought to have been furious at having to share his glory with Victor, _his_ victory after all this time. Shockingly, he wasn't. He had so much glory that he could afford to be profligate with it. Like happiness, it spilled over everywhere. Victor, Yakov, Lilia, all of them shining in his reflected light. The thought of it thrilled him. It was his, all of it, whoever it might fall upon.

"I won silver," he said to Yakov. " _Silver_! I'm buying you a Porsche!"

"What about me?" said Victor.

Yuri ignored him. "Where's Lilia?"

She was waiting for him just outside the Kiss and Cry. Yuri had to stand there, sniffing back overexcited tears, until the television coverage cut away to the next skater. But the second that happened, he launched himself off the platform and into her arms.

"My boy," she said fiercely, stroking back the loose strands of hair from his face. She didn't need to say anything else. "My boy."

"I did it, Lilia Mikhailnovna."

Behind her was standing Oleg Petrovich – Yuri hadn't even realized that he was at the Olympics. He patted Yuri's shoulder judiciously a couple of times while Yuri was still hugging Lilia.

"Well done, well done," he said. "You didn't forget about your edges."

Meanwhile Victor, overcome by emotion and missing any obvious target for it, was hugging Yakov, who hardly looked as if he minded.

Yuri only wished that his grandad could have been here. He wished that he'd waved to his grandad while he'd still been on TV. He waved to the stands instead, to the sea of anonymous faces. He loved them all, even the misguided ones who were fans of the Leroy brothers. If there was hope for him, there was still hope for the Leroy Girls.

Finally all of them – Yuri and Lilia and Yakov and Victor and Oleg Petrovich together – got ushered off together into the backstage area by some random Olympic volunteer assigned to make room for the next skater and his team. She looked faintly embarrassed by them. _Russians_ , she was probably thinking. If Yuri's head hadn't been spinning so badly, he would probably have been embarassed too.

"Oh god," he said. "I need a bottle of water or something. And maybe to sit down?"

It had all caught up with him at last. In practice he'd been skating three back-to-back repetitions of his free program – but it couldn't compare with the emotional weight of one performance in front of the world.

He spent the last few minutes of the Pyeongchang men's individual event sitting on the carpeted floor of the skaters' lounge backstage, leaning against a wall with his head between his knees. He dimly remembered thinking something mid-skate about how he didn't need to empty himself to the dregs anymore. Maybe it was good that he'd believed that, but it had turned out – like so many of these things – to be complete and utter bullshit.

And by the time that he'd started to recover, the volunteer was back again to drag him off to the podium ceremony.

"Yeah, yeah, all right," he said, letting Yakov give him a hand up off the floor. 

He had already started to stiffen up. He winced and hobbled off in her wake, still wearing his skates, back to the rink.

***

Yuri hated podium ceremonies. He'd always assumed that this was on an individual basis, because he hadn't done well enough or something, but it turned out that he just hated all of them. There was something about having to just _stand there_ in front of everyone while the IOC and the ISU made all their stupid announcements and portentous music played. It wasn't winning, because that had already happened. It was just showing off.

But he tried to smile, he really did try his best, because otherwise people would think that it was just sour grapes about not winning the gold medal. No doubt there were already Yuri's Angels writing screeds about how he had deserved gold, but anyone who thought silver at the Olympics was a disappointing result was cracked in the head. So thought Yuri as he stood for the national anthem.

_Be glorious, our free Motherland..._

After all, Victor had won silver at his first Olympics and everyone went on and on about how great that had been. Where was Victor anyway? Oh, there he was, standing with the rest of the coaches. Eat your heart out, Victor.

_Ancient union of brotherly peoples..._

Speaking of which, he was really hungry. He ought to have had a protein bar or something after he left the Kiss and Cry. When the ceremony finished they were probably going to make him do thousands and thousands of interviews. By the time he got back to the Olympic village, he was going to absolutely destroy the cafeteria buffet.

_Ancestor-given wisdom of the people!_

On the far side of Guang Hong, J.J. was smiling his white-toothed smile at the crowds. He probably _was_ disappointed. Entitled jerk, like bronze wasn't good enough for a Leroy or something.

_Be glorious, our country! We are proud of you!_

Was that the final chorus? It was. Thank God. It was over at last.

***

Yuri was always amazed at how quickly the formality and the ceremony of a competition dissolved at the end. Even at the Olympics it was the same. Spectators were racing for the exits even before the three of them stepped off the podium – or before they stepped onto the podium. Roll up the red carpet, carry away the podium. Cut the music, cut the spotlights. All the officials and judges suddenly lost interest in the competitors they'd been gazing at so admiringly and went back to (figuratively) sucking each other's dicks. The zamboni guy started warming up his machine for their big solo. Everyone drifted off towards the exits and the rink went back to being just a rink, no different from the one where he practiced every day.

This was the part that Yuri liked. He always tried to take a last lap or two of the rink, so he could appreciate his victory properly without anyone staring at him. _Silver at the Olympics._ How insane, how amazing. He'd let down his hair when he'd jumped off the podium. Now he spread his arms wide and felt it all rippling out behind him.

At the edge of the rink he could see Otabek standing and waiting for him. They'd hardly had the chance to talk since Yuri had arrived in Pyeongchang. At first he hadn't wanted to talk to anyone and then Yuri had been too busy to think about anything else.

"Hey," said Otabek when he finally stepped off the ice. "That was amazing."

"Thanks. I don't know what the fuck actually happened out there."

He would never have admitted this to anyone else, but he could say it to Otabek. They hugged each other a little awkwardly. It was figure skating, of course it had to be a hug.

"You deserved it."

"You did too, that was just shitty luck. I mean, really."

Otabek shrugged. "It happens. It was amazing just competing here."

He had fallen hard on his first jump and never quite recovered his composure or his timing afterwards. He'd come in sixth overall.

"Did you see what Georgi said on Eurosport?" asked Otabek. "It's a meme already."

"What? When would I have seen it?"

Otabek pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and showed him the clip, which someone had already uploaded to YouTube. It was Yuri's quad lutz - triple toe combination. Georgi had started shouting practically before he'd landed the second jump.

_A quad lutz... and a triple toeloop... oh, my God, he landed them both! Yuri Plisetsky is the ugly duckling spreading his wings to become a swan! This is a fairytale! A fairytale!!! What you're seeing now is redemption... live on Eurosport!_

"He's always saying shit like that," said Yuri, embarassed. What he really wanted to do was grab the phone out of Otabek's hands so that he could watch the jump again. It was really unreal.

"But it's true," replied Otabek seriously.

Yuri shrugged it away. He'd think about all of that later. Redemption was too big a topic for rinkside. Besides, there was something else he wanted to ask Otabek.

"Want to hang out tonight? I mean, if you're not... We could, like, meet up in the game room or something?"

"Yeah." A sliver of a smile. "I'm going to beat your ass at ping pong."

"In your dreams," said Yuri.

He was totally, totally going to wear his silver medal to the game room tonight.

***

The backstage areas were complete and utter chaos. People crying, hugging, having complete nervous breakdowns or conniptions... and that was just the coaches and the choreographers.

Yuri pulled on his jacket, borrowed an energy bar from someone, and stood there eating it while he tried to psych himself up for the mixed zone. People were going to ask him about Victor, they were going to ask about coming seventeenth at Worlds, they were going to ask about fucking redemption, and he might have won silver but it was still going to be a shitshow. Any minute now Yakov was going to quit nattering with Tamara Trusova and bodily drag him out there whether he liked it or not. But not quite yet.

It was Victor who found him first. He came strolling over, looking lightly amused. 

"Have you seen the thing with Gosha on Eurosport? He's waiting for you out there. He says it's going to be the interview of the century."

"Yeah, Beka showed me. Whatever. Next time I'm going to win gold."

Victor's mouth quirked up in a smile. He leaned in confidentially. "Are you so sure? What about me?"

"You have got to be fucking _kidding_ me," said Yuri slowly.

"Of course I'm kidding!" Victor beamed. "Oh Yura, you should have seen your face just now!"

Yuri studied Victor suspiciously. Sure, it sounded like he had been joking, but you never knew with Victor. Sometimes he said the most serious things like that, like he was testing you or something.

"Anyway," added Victor, "what are you up to now? Celebrating? It's such a shame you won't turn eighteen for another two weeks."

Yuri hadn't even realised that Victor knew when his birthday was. "Huh? Why?"

Victor smiled nostalgically. "Because I can tell you, the afterparties are a lot more fun when you're over eighteen. You may not care but a lot of other people do."

This was so fucking priceless. "I don't know what's sadder, Victor, that you bothered to look up the age of consent here or that you got it wrong."

"These international things. People always think eighteen. Trust me, I was seventeen once."

"About three thousand years ago." Yuri rolled his eyes. "I just won a silver medal. Do I look like I give a fuck about afterparties? They're all yours."

 _Because I'm going to be playing ping pong with Otabek,_ he could have added in triumph, but he didn't think Victor deserved to know.

"Oh, I'm a happily married old man now." Eclipsing his previous expression of utterly self-congratulatory contentment, a cloud passed across Victor's face. "Also I need to go and have my back looked at. I might need another operation."

Yuri made a face. "Sucks."

Victor shrugged. "I got my gold medal. It was worth it."

And Yuri could understand that. It would have been worth it to him too. He supposed that was the one way they were alike.

Victor had started to walk away, but then he thought better of it. He turned and looked back at Yuri over one shoulder. His coat swung around him with the movement.

"And do you know what, Yura? I predicted this! Don't you remember?"

"Predicted what? What the hell are you talking about?"

"That it would take two years to get over your growth spurt. That's what I said, that time you came to dinner at my place. You came to ask me for advice. Maybe you don't remember it, but I do. And I was right!"

All of a sudden it flooded back into Yuri's mind. It seemed like an eternity ago – that awkward dinner at Victor's flat in Piter, when Victor had poured him a glass of wine for the first time in his life and had seemed to have absolutely no advice to give him apart from _wait_. He'd thought that Victor had just invited him there to laugh at him. He'd thought that Victor was trying to psych him out. Two years had seemed an eternity and the idea of being patient had seemed a bad joke.

"You – you – " said Yuri, his heart spilling over with such a confused mix of indignation and forgiveness that he could hardly speak. "You asshole! You know-it-all! You really think... you expect me to believe that you _meant_ that? You really think you can take credit for it now? I hate you so much. I hate you more than anyone else in the _world_!"

"Oh, Yura. Yuratchka. I hate you too."

But Victor had spoken so gently that he might have been saying something else entirely. He stepped forward again and put his arms around Yuri, like it was the most natural thing in the world. From a distance Yuri could hear the clicking of camera shutters, but for once he didn't care. Without even needing to think about it, he was hugging Victor back. Without being able to stop it, he was crying.

"Fuck off, old man," he said. "Fuck off, Vitya. You know I never listen to a word you say."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finished at last. Thank you to everyone who has read, kudosed and commented along the way. In particular I'd like to thank hadjie, nineveh_uk and aedh, who have spent a lot of time listening to me obsess about this in person.
> 
> If you've been following figure skating for a while, you'll know that the basic plot of this story was ripped by the headlines. Specifically it was inspired by the rivalry of Evgeni Plushenko and Maxim Kovtun leading up to the Sochi Olympics in 2014. Because you couldn't make this stuff up. (And yes, it does diverge at the end, because neither I nor Victor is actually that cruel.)
> 
> A few of the sources I used along the way:
> 
> [Who will represent Russia in the men's event at the Olympics, still a mystery](http://www.insideskating.net/2013/12/28/features/who-will-represent-russia-in-the-mens-event-at-the-olympics-still-a-mystery)
> 
> [Russia chooses Plushenko for Sochi Olympics](http://www.goldenskate.com/forum/showthread.php?44414-Russia-chooses-Plushenko-for-Sochi-Olympics) (Golden Skate thread)
> 
> [The Plushenko case: to skate or not to skate?](http://web.icenetwork.com/news/2014/01/17/66781884/the-plushenko-case-to-skate-or-not-to-skate)
> 
> [Evgeni Plushenko steps up again for Russia](http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2014/02/10/russia-still-figure-skating-power-under-evgeni-plushenko/nUcUkcgldofnKTp5akjtGJ/story.html)
> 
> [Evgeni Plushenko shocks Sochi](https://www.thestar.com/sports/sochi2014/figureskating/2014/02/13/russian_figure_skater_plushenko_bows_out_of_sochi_with_melodrama_dimanno.html)
> 
> [Backlash Swells Over Plushenko's Last-Minute Withdrawal From Olympic Figure Skating](https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/Plushenko-Sochi-Retirement-Mens-Figure-Skating-Kovtun--245491891.html)
> 
> [NBC coverage of Plushenko's withdrawal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa_oA2ae8C8)
> 
> [Evgeni Plushenko](https://goldenskate.com/forum/showthread.php?38503-Evgeni-Plushenko/page35) (general Golden Skate thread starting from the November before Sochi)
> 
> And more general background for Yuri's experience at the Olympics, which I found fascinating:
> 
> [The Alternates](https://victoryjournal.com/stories/the-alternates/)
> 
> [Alexi Pappas Shares Secrets From the Olympic Village](https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/alexi-pappas-shares-secrets-from-the-olympic-village/)


End file.
